Chapter Text
Daniel’s worldview has always been pretty elastic.
Maybe it’s because he got mauled by vampires as a dumb kid, and even if one of those vampires subsequently brainfucked him into forgetting most of it, a stubborn little part of Daniel dug in and held on to the idea that there’s bigger, weirder shit out there than you can possibly understand.
Or maybe he was always like this. Maybe it’s a personality flaw and the fact that he rolls so easily with what’s in front of him is why - on realizing actual fucking vampires existed - one of the first things he said was, ‘hey man can I see your fangs again?’
Either way, he’s never had a lot of patience for mulling over what should and shouldn’t be. Save it for the philosophy class. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you think something shouldn’t be possible – if it’s sitting right in front of you, crying blood tears about its ex-husband on a million-dollar brutalist couch, you still have to deal with it.
All this to say, he’s not actually that freaked out when he gets home from the last leg of a book tour to find Armand babysitting a bunch of his younger selves.
Daniel's only been a vampire for a few years – what the fuck does he know? Maybe this is normal.
It was a few hours before dawn when Daniel had gotten in, tired and grungy from an overnight flight. His sinuses are dried out from breathing stale, recycled air and he’s bitchy from spending three hours squeezing into what some bottom-line-fellating Boeing executive had calculated was the bare minimum of space a grown man needed to survive, but he stops to eat some business class asshole in the parking garage at LaGuardia and feels a little better.
Yeah, sure, he could have let Armand make his travel arrangements for him and spent the trip back from Atlanta reclining in a chartered jet, with a drunk twenty-something on tap, but Daniel still feels like a massive class traitor flying anything but coach. He'd brought it on himself. Doesn't mean he has to like it.
He's thinking about how many airline executives he'd have to eat to get some changes made in the industry when he gets home, kicks off his shoes, drops his bag in the entryway, and calls out, “Honey, I’m home,” to the suspiciously quiet apartment.
No answer. Weird, but not too weird. Sometimes even a nuclear bomb going off by his ear wouldn’t distract Armand from whatever his latest fixation is.
Daniel trudges towards the bedroom, and a shower. The first thing Armand had done when he moved into Daniel's place was remodel Daniel's bathroom. He wanted to be mad about it, but sue him – the shower was incredible. He was entitled to a few creature comforts. Right now, Daniel wants a long shower, to make out with Armand sloppy-style for an hour, and then his coffin, in that order.
“Hey, don't unpack my shit, I'll do it tomorrow when I get up,” he calls out.
There was still about an eighty-percent chance he was going to wake up to his bag unpacked, his papers missing, and his underwear cleaned and refolded. Armand was a compulsive tidy-er.
Speak of the devil. Before he can reach the bedroom, Armand appears before him in a sudden burst of vampiric speed and pulls Daniel into a full-body kiss.
“Hello to you too-” Daniel mutters against his mouth.
“Hello,” Armand smiles. Then he winds his long arms around Daniel’s neck, presses up against him, knees to shoulders, like an anaconda measuring whether it can swallow its prey whole, and kisses him again. Daniel goes along with it for a few minutes, happy to let this gorgeous, ancient creature try to suck his soul out through his mouth.
He’s dressed casually by Armand standards, in a white button-up that Daniel itches to untuck from the waistband of his tailored pants. He’s halfway there, when something twinges in the back of his mind. Daniel pulls back just a little, because he is first and foremost a suspicious bastard.
“What did you do?” he says.
Perfectly breathless, somehow managing to bend himself so that he is looking up into Daniel’s eyes, despite being taller than him, Armand says, “I don’t know what you mean, beloved. I missed you.”
Shit. Daniel groans.
“Yeah, but that’s not an ‘I missed you’ kiss. That’s an ‘I want you to remember that you think I’m really hot before I spring something horrible on you’ kiss. …You didn’t hit a possum with the lawn mower, did you?”
Armand deploys his best look of innocent, Bambi-eyed confusion.
“No. We don’t have a lawn mower. We don’t have a lawn. You think lawns are egocentric, consumerist, and inherently feudalistic. I remember.” Then he pauses, a pretty little frown creasing his brows. Five-hundred year old monster with the face of an angel. “Possum? Are those the ones with the rings around their tails?”
“No, those are raccoons. Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not changing the subject. You’re the one who brought up possums. No, I did not hit a possum with the lawn mower that we do not own.”
“Yeah, no, I didn’t really think – it’s a joke-”
Something goes thud behind the closed bedroom door.
Armand smiles again, all pretty white teeth, and cards his fingers through the curls at the nape of Daniel’s neck. “How was your flight? Have you eaten?”
“Fine,” Daniel says, patiently, “I grabbed a snack on the way home from the airport. What was that sound?”
“What sound?" Armand's smile isn’t even a little strained at the edges
Three more thuds, like something hitting the wall. A crash. The sound of something breaking.
Daniel points a finger. “That sound.”
Before Armand can lie again, muffled shouting comes from behind the closed bedroom door, panicked sounds in a foreign language.
Armand’s look of sweet, innocent, confusion falls off like the mask it was. He snarls, angel to devil in less than a second, abandoning Daniel to rush with vampiric speed towards the source of all the noise.
Daniel follows at a more leisurely pace.
Armand mind-flings open the bedroom door hard enough to leave a dent in the plaster.
“You’re fixing that,” Daniel calls, before gagging, “Shit– what is that? You didn’t forget about a corpse did you?”
Something smells rancid in there. The smell hits him like a brick to the face now that the door is open. Was that the vampire equivalent of leaving your leftovers in the back of the fridge until they got moldy?
The shouting is a lot clearer, a shrill voice swearing in what Daniel thinks is probably Italian.
“Vai a farti fottere! Cazzo!”
There’s something familiar about the voice, but Daniel can’t make out what it is, before he is looking over Armand’s shoulder at one of the weirdest things he’s ever seen.
Daniel has a pretty damn high standard for weirdness, and this still makes the top three.
There are three of Armand.
Daniel counts them. One. Two. Three.
Three Armands.
There's the one in the doorway, now snarling, "Je t'ai dit non!" at another, dirtier, scruffier Armand standing in the middle of the bedroom.
Based on the stained, tattered clothes, the black filth caked on his bare feet, and the way his hair hangs lank and greasy around his face, Daniel doesn't think he has to look far for the source of the dead animal smell.
The third Armand is dressed like an escapee from the local Renaissance fair, in blue velvet and tights. Based on the fact that he’s crawled up the back of a chair and is brandishing their fancy cordless stick vacuum like a sword at the dirty Armand, Daniel’s keen investigative skills tell him that this is probably the source of all the screaming. In Italian.
Screaming in Italian and wearing tights. A little alarm bell goes off in the back of Daniel’s mind.
“Well fuck me,” Daniel says. He has the vague urge to adjust his non-existent glasses, a remnant of pre-undead muscle memory.
The dirty, scruffy Armand hisses at them, all kitten fangs and cold, dead eyes.
Daniel’s Armand hisses back.
They glare at each other for a minute, but if Daniel's suspicions are correct, then his Armand is older and stronger, in addition to being a lot more pissed off. He wins the vampiric dick-measuring contest. Daniel’s just a little bit proud. Yeah, that's right, buddy.
The other Armand sheathes his fangs like a good boy. Without anything that could remotely be considered a facial expression, he slinks into the dark en suite bathroom, disappearing into the shadows. There’s a little thud against the porcelain as he climbs into the bathtub. Daniel can make out a pair of empty orange eyes in the dark, watching him over the rim of the tub.
Daniel rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “Any chance we could turn the water on while he’s in there?”
“He thinks bathing is a sinful indulgence,” Armand says. He sounds tired.
“Right. Yeah. Of course he does.”
Daniel gives himself a moment to digest everything.
He's been through the Talamasca files on Armand. Of course he had. He’s a nosy bastard. It isn't hard to connect the dots.
Two extra copies of Armand. One wearing tights and screaming in Italian – or whatever dialect they spoke in sixteenth-century Venice – and one that looked like he just crawled out of a French sewer.
“So this is what you were trying to hide from me? You, what -- accidentally Boys From Brazil’d yourself?”
Armand turns to look at him. He’s got that cute little frown line between his eyebrows, the one he gets when he’s so distracted trying to figure something out that he forgets to care about how his face looks.
“You are not taking this the way I anticipated.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel sees Armand-in-tights slowly unpeeling himself from the back of the chair, casting anxious looks at the dark doorway to the bathroom the whole time. He’s still holding the stick vacuum out like a sword, bravado kinda belied by the fact that he's climbing down off the furniture like a fifties housewife who saw a mouse.
Daniel shrugs
“You can also fly and stop time. I tend to just assume the laws of physics are a suggestion to us at this point. Anyway, let's face it, boss – this is not the weirdest thing I’ve seen you do. I mean, it’s up there. Top five, definitely. But so is the time you wore contact lenses and pretended to be a human named Rashid for a week.”
Armand gives him the Bambi eyes again, like he just loves Daniel so much. Like he can't believe how lucky he is to have Daniel in his life.
“I’m sorry beloved. I will fix this soon, I promise. It was an accident – you know I have been looking for ways to uncover more of the parts of my life I have forgotten-”
Daniel knows. Armand doesn’t make a big deal out of it, but Daniel knows it bothers him. Armand doesn’t make a big deal out of anything that bothers him. He just bottles it up for a few hundred years and then has the kind of nervous breakdown that comes with a body count.
They're working on it. They've got time.
”I know, you don't have to justify yourself to me. It's okay. Just tell me what happened.”
Armand sighs. “I first attempted the spell the day after you left, but the results were… not adequate. Not what I wanted. I made some adjustments and tried again three days ago. I was unconscious for a time afterwards - perhaps a day - and when I regained my senses-”
“Okay, wait wait – what?” Daniel says, louder than he intends. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the kid, younger Armand, Amadeo, startle. He’s trying hard to pretend he’s not listening in. Daniel wonders how good his English is.
Sorry, kid, private conversation. Daniel always hated arguing in front of his own kids.
He steers Armand out of the doorway and back into the living room. He leaves the bedroom door open. It probably wasn’t smart to leave those two completely unsupervised.
Once they’re alone, Daniel sits Armand down on the couch and says, “This has been going on for two days and you didn’t tell me? Didn’t think to text me? I would have come home early. And that’s not even getting into the fact that you waited until I was gone to do weird and potentially dangerous shit to yourself-”
“I know, beloved, I’m sorry-”
“Are you? Do you even get why I’m upset right now?”
“You needn’t stay and help me clean up my mistakes,” Armand says, soothing. “I understand entirely. Leave me to my mess and I will contact you once I’ve gotten rid of them.”
“I’m not – that’s the opposite of the problem I have with this. I want to help you. You realize that, right?”
The look on his face says Armand does not understand. Great. So it was going to be one of Those conversations: the ones about partnerships and trust and how Armand knows Daniel actually loves him as a person and not just as a hot fuck that’ll be discarded the second he becomes inconvenient, right? Right?
Daniel pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay, babe, look-”
Before he can finish that thought, the floor creaks with stockinged footsteps. Amadeo is standing in the hallway. “Pardone mi stesso – excuse… where Arun? No rieso - I can not find.”
Arun. Of course there was an Arun. How could Daniel have forgotten Arun?
Like a man dodging out of the way of an oncoming train, Armand bails out of the conversation with Daniel. He replies in rapid Italian- Venetian- whichever, but Daniel isn’t following it anyway, because something is scratching at his brain.
Okay, so Daniel’s practically a vampire child prodigy when it comes to the Mind Gift. Perks of the bloodline, although his ego likes to think that he’s also just good at reading people. Louis had talked about learning to read people, but since he turned, Daniel has found it harder to keep everybody else’s thoughts out of his head.
He never bothers to guard his mind when he’s at home and it’s just him and Armand. They can’t read each other anyway, it’s that maker/fledgling thing, so no need to put the effort in like he does when he’s out in public. But now someone else’s thoughts are scratching at his mind.
Arun. Amadeo feels responsible for him, knows that this is his younger self, guilt that he has lost him already, and with both that filthy creature and a strange man in the house – if anything happens to Arun because Amadeo failed to prevent it –
It's not words, not exactly. More like scattered impulses and impressions. But it's definitely coming from Armand's younger self.
“Uh, hey boss…” Daniel says slowly.
“Hm?”
“I can read him. Younger you – Amadeo — whatever you want to call him. I can read his thoughts.”
“Can you? Well, I suppose that makes as much sense as anything. He is not your maker. Biologically, he’s still human. Fascinating.”
Now that Daniel is really looking at the kid he can see it – and he really is a kid, fuck, that’s Armand’s face looking at him, but softer, rounder, with big brown eyes and baby fat still on his cheeks, no way he’s out of his teens. There’s warmth under his skin. Life. This isn’t just Armand as a teenager, it’s Armand as a living boy.
Arun, the living boy is thinking, with increasing urgency. Arun. Arun is gone. Stop talking, you say you can read me, as maestro does, then stop talking. Be quiet, you distract Myself and we must find Arun before someone hurts him –
“Okay, okay,” Daniel holds his hands up, “I hear you, kid. Where did you see Arun last?”
Amadeo turns back to the bedroom, clearly wanting them to follow. There's high-strung tension in every line of his body, every little twist of his hands. Daniel and Armand follow him.
“You needn’t cater to him. He’s overprotective,” Armand says, sotto voce, “The child hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s hiding. Their little spat undoubtedly frightened him.”
“It’s fine. It calms him down. Anyway, I figure I should probably go ahead and meet all of you in one go,” Daniel says. He hesitates. “That is all of them, right? Arun, Amadeo, Armand – is that it? Because if you say no, and then I find Maitre or something asleep in my coffin, I’m gonna be pissed.”
“No, no, there are just the three of them. And myself, of course.”
“Okay, good.”
Then, in a quiet voice, Armand adds, “Though you might still find Maitre in your coffin later, if you ask nicely.”
Daniel grins. He leans in close enough to say, “Not in front of the kids,” in Armand's ear, and gives his ass a little swat.
In the bedroom, Amadeo is on his hands and knees, peering under the bed, “No qua… not here. I look. Arun?”
He was here, but the filthy creature came in, and then I was distracted –
Daniel goes to the dark doorway of the en suite bathroom. He flicks on the overhead light. The gremlin in the bathtub hisses and recoils.
“Hey, you speak English? You see where the little boy went?”
Big, orange eyes stare at him, unblinking from beneath a curtain of greasy hair.
Daniel stares back, cocking his head to the side, expectantly.
“No children here.”
“ ‘kay,” Daniel says, and flicks the light back off. He closes the door behind him.
Amadeo has flung open the walk-in closet, and Daniel can hear him thinking black and grey and brown and more black, Myself is very dull, like a priest mixed with a low thrum of anxiety as his searching turns up nothing.
Armand watches them from the doorway, seemingly disinterested.
“You check in here?” Daniel asks, pointing to the doorway to the coffin room.
When Daniel first got the place, he'd still been married to his second wife, who had taken all the clothes racks out of their second closet so she could use it for her for her kundalini yoga, back when that was all the rage with the trendy liberal artist set. When she moved out, Daniel had never bothered putting them back. It had become a junk room for all the papers Daniel was getting around to doing something about one day. Now he and Armand kept their coffins in there.
Back when he was interviewing Louis, Daniel had wondered what the deal was with vampires and coffins. Was it an aesthetic? A kink thing? Seemed like a set of good blackout curtains would make the coffin unnecessary.
Turns out it was like cats and boxes. Once you were a vampire, there was just something about a rectangle with a lid, where you could be functionally dead for the day. As a fledgling, the sun came up and that coffin called to Daniel like a siren lover. But you still couldn’t beat a bed for fucking, cuddling, napping, and laying around scrolling Twitter in your underwear. That’s why they had both.
There wasn’t much else in the coffin room. They had decorated it together. Armand had hung one of his monstrously huge oil paintings on one wall – a particularly dark and gloomy nineteenth-century depiction of the Resurrection of Lazarus. Daniel had put a couple of his vintage Queen posters on the opposite side.
When Daniel sticks his head in the doorway, he notices that while his own coffin has been left open, Armand’s is closed. A long charger cable snakes from the socket on the wall, across the floor, and under the lid.
If Daniel listens, he can hear a faint, digital ting ting bloop coming from inside. He smiles.
“Here he is,” Daniel calls. “Think the kid found your iPad, boss.”
That brings both of them rushing to the doorway just as Daniel pulls open the lid of the coffin. Curled up on his side against the dark fabric is a kid that can only be Arun.
Arun has stick-insect limbs and a mess of curly dark hair. His clothes are plain, some kind of baggy shorts, tied at the knees, and a simple shirt in that shade of beige you only get from raw, unbleached cotton.
“Arun!” Amadeo says, pushing past Daniel.
The kid barely looks up, staring in rapt fascination at the iPad screen, where colorful fruits are exploding into sprays of coins as he jabs them with his finger.
Daniel can’t blame him. iPads hypnotize kids nowadays – he can only imagine how impressive it must seem to a boy from the fifteen-hundreds.
Amadeo goes down on his knees next to the coffin, petting Arun's hair, hands fluttering over his shoulders like he's checking for injuries. He's telling him off the whole time, but there's more relief than irritation in his tone.
For his part, Arun seems unbothered. He lets the other kid fuss over him, keeps jabbing at the exploding fruit on the screen. Occasionally, when Amadeo pauses, he interjects in a lilting language that Daniel doesn't recognize – something South Asian, definitely, maybe Hindi. Daniel makes a mental note to stick the kid in front of a translator app and see what pops up.
Arun and Amadeo don't seem to share a common language, but Amadeo speaks fluent Neurotic Older Sibling Left In Charge While Mom's At Work, and Arun seems to be picking him up just fine from the tone alone.
Daniel focuses and realizes he has a backstage pass to their little bilingual conversation.
– Arun you mustn't hide from me, did you not hear me calling you, I was frightened for you, you don't know what can happen to you if you are not with me –
– Amadeo is upset, was he looking for me? I did not hear him. I am sorry, Amadeo! I found this thing with the colorful pictures, it makes so many noises –
It's… okay, Daniel knows he's an asshole on his best days, but it's kinda cute. They seem to have bonded already.
“Amadeo–” Arun shoves the iPad in Amadeo's face, in the universal little-kid gesture of look look look at this thing, isn't it neat?
Armand reaches over and takes it deftly out of his hands.
“That’s mine,” he says, frowning at the smudgy fingerprints on the screen.
Arun sits up a little straighter, hangs his head, and says something that sounds like an apology. At least Daniel knew where Armand got the Bambi eyes from now – you couldn't stay mad at this kid if you tried.
Unless you're Armand, apparently.
“You are –” he begins, making that little pinch-lipped face he got when he was annoyed and trying not to show it. “Don't touch things that don't belong to you. Keep your sticky little fingers to yourself. Do you understand?”
Arun repeats his apology, hunching smaller. Daniel reaches out and brushes against the corner of his mind.
Arun doesn’t understand the words, but he can tell Armand is unhappy with him for touching the thing that makes noises. He knows that Armand is the master of this strange place Arun has found himself in, full of colorful magical things, but where no one speaks his language. He should not make Armand angry, his mother and father will be very disappointed in him if he disobeys an adult in their own home–
“He gets it, give the kid a break,” Daniel says, steering Armand gently back into the other room. “I have screen wipes in my office. It's fine.”
For half a second, Daniel and Amadeo share a look of pained camaraderie. Two parents whose kids have gotten in a scrap on the playground. I've got mine, you take care of yours.
“Am I to assume you can read him as well?” Armand says, on the way back to the living room. “The… Arun.”
“Yeah, kinda. It's more like impressions of feelings, but the actual thoughts come through here and there. Maybe a language barrier thing.”
Daniel ducks into his office and returns with the plastic tube of screen cleaner wipes. Armand takes one, sits down on the couch with what is absolutely not a huff, and starts meticulously wiping little circles in one corner of the screen.
“Can you?” Daniel says.
“Can I…?”
“Read him. Them.”
Armand buffs industriously at one spot, mouth set in a little moue of displeasure. Daniel waits.
“No,” Armand says finally. “I cannot.”
“Huh,” Daniel says.
“Brilliant commentary, investigative Reporter Molloy. I say I cannot read the mind of my younger selves and you say huh.”
Even busted out the faux-American accent for the ‘huh’. He is in a mood. Well, Daniel knows how to deal with that.
“Come on, is that the best you've got?” Daniel says, lazily. “If you wanna take your frustration on me, that's fine, I can take it, but at least be creative.”
Armand really does give a little huff, then, folding the little cotton cleaning wipe before scrunching it up in his hands. Refolding it. Scrunching it.
Then he says, “I… I am sorry. You put up with the problems I have caused, I should not– I am sorry.”
No, they’re cutting that off before it turns into a whole self-recrimination spiral.
“You better be.” Daniel says, “I have expectations, man. You can't call me an eager black hole the first time we meet and then downgrade to plain old sarcasm. I'm disappointed.”
Armand looks up from the twisted up wet wipe in his hands, surprised.
Daniel feels like an asshole for a minute, suddenly realizing Armand might think he's serious. Might be taking it as real criticism. He's about to say something like, ‘hey come on you know I'm just kidding right babe’ when the corner of Armand's mouth curves up a little. It's tentative, like he's not entirely sure he's allowed to smile.
“I'll work on my repartee,” Armand says, half-smiling. “I do so hate to disappoint you.”
“Only the best insults for your fledgling?”
There it is – Armand laughs.
“Yes,” he says, around his grin, “Bespoke condescension and artisanally-crafted mockery.”
“Just for me.”
“Just for you. Nothing less.”
“Damn right.”
Armand gives Daniel that look again – like he's one of the seven wonders of the world.
“Thank you,” Armand says. “And… I am sorry. For not informing you of this mishap sooner. I did not want to burden you.”
“So you haven't been able to talk to him at all, then? Arun,” Daniel adds. “He was thinking about how no one here speaks his language. That includes you. You can talk to the other two, but not him.”
“That's correct. Their minds are closed to me, and as you can see, he lost his first language very early in life.” Armand says. Daniel can tell the effort it takes him to say it. Can sense the urge to hide and deny and say that everything is fine.
“None of us can understand him,” he adds, even more quietly.
The one person Armand most wants to talk to in the world, the one who has the secrets to everything he so desperately wants to remember, brought through time and space, and Armand can't talk to him. Can't talk to him for the very reason he wants to talk to him – because somewhere over the years between them, Armand forgot everything about Arun, even his native language.
Daniel lifts up his arm, making room against his side.
“Come here,” he says.
Armand sets the iPad aside and shuffles closer, laying his head over Daniel's heart.
Daniel drops his arm around Armand. He doesn't say anything as sappy as, ‘it's gonna be okay’ or ‘you'll get through it’. He's never been good at platitudes, as both his ex-wives and multiple girlfriends will attest. Which works, because Armand would find anything he had to say along those lines unbearably trite and saccharine.
With one hand, he rubs Armand's hip.
Then, Daniel says, “Did you try a translator app?”