Chapter Text
Louis is long gone by the time one of the nameless servants shamble together a coffee service. He spits the words like venom as he pulls Claudia’s diaries and anything else he doesn’t trust Armand with into a knapsack: “I’m not spending a second more in your orbit, Armand.”
So he’s off to be pulled back into Lestat’s, Daniel guesses.
And that leaves Daniel and Armand, still covered in dust, sitting in the living room.
“So,” Daniel pours a glass from the copper pot and plops a sugar in because why not? He deserves a little treat after destroying an immortal marriage. “Does he get the penthouse in the divorce? Who signed the papers?”
Armand’s fingers are rubbing back and forth in that little tell. They press hard enough that his pale nails turn white.
“I mean, did you even sign papers or just thrall some hapless real estate agent into giving it to you and then ‘rest’ and reset all your neighbours?”
Armand stays silent. In the moment Louis had pieced everything together, Armand had looked more fragile than his 500 plus years suggested. Now the belated anger is there, living under his skin and thrumming through him like hot blood.
It’s probably not a good idea to provoke him further, but Louis’ words feel like enough armour to get out his own irritation at the brat.
“It must be Louis. He was the investor after all. Does that mean you get nothing in this? Minus your tree, I suppose. No apartment, no love of your life. Zilch. I know a good lawyer if you—”
Armand lunges so fast, Daniel doesn’t have time to shout. The coffee service scatters across the floor in a spray of sugar, Turkish delights and perfectly brewed middle eastern coffee. Armand’s pointed nails are wrapped around Daniel’s throat. It stings and no doubt there’s blood dripping down his neck.
No, he’s sure of it because Armand’s eyes are black pools as he hovers over Daniel, ignoring the Parkinson's flare up that’s rattling his arms.
“Louis said—” Daniel stammers, before steeling himself not to sound like an idiot. “Louis told you not to touch—”
“You’d given her no reason to trust you,” Armand says instead of lunging and ripping his throat open to finish what he started back in San Francisco.
“What the hell are you saying, man?” Daniel says. He struggles but the sting in his neck only increases. Armand holds him tighter, like a cat stopping an escaping mouse.
“Alice. In Paris.” Armand leans closer and the dust from Louis crushing him into the wall flakes off onto Daniel below him. So close, the repressed rage that has simmered for weeks is on full display and Daniel can see the creature under the art sales and open-necked designer shirts: the black-eyed insect that devours thousands of lives. “You were untrustworthy then. But you’re not the same boy in San Francisco. Tonight has proven that. Single-minded. Relentless. A brutal killer already in your own right, seeking facts like we seek blood.”
“Seriously? What the fuck are you saying?” He lifts his leg and kicks up. It’s like kicking granite. Hot coffee is seeping into his plaid shirt. “Get off me, Armand.”
“‘I would give it to you now’,” he says, his voice inflecting a mockery of Louis’ accent. “That’s what he, Louis, said to you. That he would take that away… from…”
The whites of Armand’s eyes are turning pink. This monster is going to cry onto me, Daniel realises with a stark laugh. What the hell was he supposed to do with that? Comfort him? Over what? He has zero idea.
“Well, he didn’t in the end,” Daniel says and tries to crane away.
“That warrants investigating,” Armand says, and the words are a hot rod inserted into Daniel’s brain as Armand leans down to his exposed neck and sinks his fangs in.
“What the fuck?” Daniel manages to scrape out of his mouth. Armand is on top of him and there’s an electricity gathering in his throat. Warmth. A pulsating drumming, Louis had called it. He can hear the procession in his ears.
That and Armand’s noise. The only other time Daniel remembers hearing it was during his and Louis’ performative feasting in front of him. A soft, tender thing that hinges on a breath.
‘Want to know what he tastes like ?’
The warmth pools for a second in his guts.
Armand is going to kill him and Louis will kill him in turn, but that doesn’t fucking matter. Images are blurring as the pulsating becomes stronger, his fingers and toes turning cold like coming inside after a blizzard.
He’s a stupid kid being fired from his job for pushing the AIDs coverage beyond what their ‘delicate’ readership wants to read. He’s snorting so much cocaine in the back alley of a dive bar that his nose is bleeding onto his last clean shirt. Alice flashes through his mind, but she’s a brunette with orange eyes who doesn’t let him finish his lamb shank before dragging him down the Champs-Élysées spouting off crap about the Arc de Triomphe’s 1836’s inauguration. There’s his two daughters, three years apart packing their bags for college. Leaving with a cold hug and a promise to come home for the holidays that doesn’t materialize—that he doesn’t push. Alice kissing each of his eyebrows after a bad high and promising to make it stop. Armand, straddling him, tossing dollar bills at him as he demands that he call Paris on the telephone. Armand critiquing his vinyl collection. Armand calling him Danny as he cradles his head as he shakes through withdrawals. Armand blending rats with a delighted laugh so loud, it startles him. Alice bleeds into Armand. And then it’s all Armand. Armand. Armand.
His limbs are ice. His vision is going black. It really does feel like slipping into a bath, but a cold one that leaves him gasping.
Then there’s fire in his mouth. It tastes impossibly sweet, and Daniel wonders in disorientation if he put too much sugar in his coffee after all.
“Drink up, Danny.” A voice is whispering. “I would give it to you now.”
Daniel wraps his hands around the wrist offered to him and can’t even consider how fucked up it is that he’s drinking from a wrist at all. Or that it tastes finer than any bubbling post-book celebration champagne sent from his editor.
But then there’s a new rush of images. Terrifying images.
Daniel when he’s younger buying a newspaper at a stand in the morning light. Daniel too messed up from the constant flights around the world falling asleep during a midnight showing of Apocalypse Now in German. Daniel tucked into bed as a dark-skinned hand reaches out to smooth back curls. Daniel warm. Daniel laughing between scoops of ice cream. Daniel. Daniel begging ‘Let me watch you do it. I want to watch you kill.’ Daniel begging across a patio table for eternal life and a black hole in his heart when denying him it. And then Daniel now, old and hardened and challenging and irritating and single-minded. Relentless. He’s smirking across the table and under the surface level annoyance is a fondness and adoration so vast it feels like he’s sinking into a dark ocean without a bottom. He’s glad he’s there. He’s glad Louis made this happen, despite his original reservations. He’s so, so glad to see Daniel again. Daniel. Daniel. His Danny.
“S-Shit,” Daniel gasps as the blood is torn from his mouth.
Armand is panting beside him on the floor. Radiant. Daniel turns to watch him hold his face in his hands. “Why did it feel…” his words are slurred. And there’s a shattering, hitched sound before Armand lets out a sob. A real sob. Not the affected garbage meant as a shiny lure to pull Louis back into his depths. A blood tear rolls down the side of his cheek. “It was not…”
“Armand?” Daniel croaks, rolling onto his side. The memories are all throttling in his skull, tangling into some messed up painful need. The pain is only a prelude to the hell his body is about to go through though. “Armand? Did you just kill me?”
Armand stands on wobbly feet, clutching onto the sofa. There’s blood streaming down his flushed face, mixing with the cement dust. His pupils are so wide the rings of orange look like solar eclipses.
“I….I…” his lips move like there’s more words. “I can’t hear you anymore.”
Then, Armand turns and Daniel watches him go to the window. He crawls towards him but Armand isn’t listening. He’s stumbling and catching himself on anything. Vases are tumbling and crashing across the floor. A chair knocks over.
“Don’t fucking leave me! Coward!” Daniel screams before doubling over, the pain seizing inside his stomach. He’s going to vomit any second. The reality of the last few minutes snaps into place. Armand drained him and then he fed him his blood. He’s spent weeks listening to two pompous assholes drone on about what that single action means. He knows what it means. He’s about to become one of them and Armand, his maker, is running away.
“You fucking asshole!”
Armand turns from the open Dubai penthouse window. “I’m sorry Daniel I’m…” his face scrunches like he’s going to cry again and then the bastard steps onto the balcony fence. For a moment, in his delirium, Daniel thinks he’s about to kill himself. But then he’s floating down and leaving Daniel to die alone.
The change is excruciating. Worse than any of the withdrawals he can remember having. And he can remember them now. All of them, even those spent in Armand’s arms. Armand is gone and Daniel makes a mess of the apartment as he dies. He almost feels bad about what Louis’s going to come back to. He’s going to have to buy new furniture at the very least. But then that bastard also left him. Told Armand not to hurt him but left no insurance that he wouldn’t. Just a word Daniel mistook as protection. A word towards someone who clearly couldn’t be trusted with exactly that.
So when Daniel finally emerges the next night from the gold-walled elevator and kills the first person who walks by—a British expat who lives in one of the lower apartments—he knows what he has to do.
He’s going to write one hell of a book and he’s going to sink everything he has into marketing to plaster it everywhere. It’s going to be a fucking bestseller so Armand sees his face on every billboard, on every talk show.
And if that doesn’t lure him out, he’s going to hunt him down. He’s a damn good investigative journalist and he’ll find whatever corner of the world he’s skittered off to.
Because he knows now the one piece of the interview he never could quite place. Why Armand never turned on him, even as Daniel poked, and prodded wounds, and tore their happy ever after apart.
Armand loved him. Loves him. And the fucked up, twisted, gnarly part that Daniel thinks as he hails a driver to the Dubai International Airport is that the bond between maker and fledgling really is something else. Because maybe, buried somewhere deep amongst the memories, Daniel remembers loving him too.