Chapter Text
Armand was breathless, hair unkempt, remnants of the wall across his face and clothes.
Daniel felt terror but beneath that terror, an absurd sort of awkwardness. This creature, an undead monster, was humiliated before him.
“For San Francisco?” Armand croaked.
Daniel almost laughed. For a centuries old vampire, he still thought they were all playing by the schoolyard rules of tit for tat. “You think I told him for revenge? For what? For fucking with my mind? For almost killing me?”
Armand was quiet, covered in white soot, cuts that would soon heal leaking blood on his face.
Daniel continued, against his better judgment. Armand deserved a good rake over the coals, and Louis wasn’t here to do it. “A bit of the old projection, huh? You think this was some master plot orchestrated to take you down? You’re the only one here pulling strings here, pal. You kept Louis for almost a century, here under your thumb. A lifetime, if you can even conceptualize it, chained to you!”
You: monster of monsters. You: depraved, dead thing.
Daniel laughed that bitter, rich laugh that only seemed to find men when they had aged a good deal. A laughter brought on by encountering the creatively cruel absurdity of the world for the umpteenth time. “I felt bad for the poor bastard. I can’t believe it. You and blondie’s diabolical schemes made me feel pity for a blood sucking, immortal being, a god,” he added after a moment, “a cocky one, no less.”
Armand scrunched up his face, in plain preparation to shout. “Louis forgave me. We made each other happy! I was protecting his happiness!” He yelled, a little half-heartedly for Daniel’s dramaturgical taste. “I am nothing like Lestat!”
There it was, that’s what made his voice crack, there’s what he really wants to believe.
A hardy beat passed before Daniel licked his lips, he addressed Armand the same way he would address an unpromising journalism student in one of his classes: condensing and taking some joy in it. “You’re right, Arun. You’re not Lestat. Lestat’s a kind of soap-opera villain, isn’t he? That’s how he always struck me in Louis’ stories.”
He pursed his lips in performative contemplation, “I always thought it was a bit over the top for a real person. Person?” He questioned, “Is Lestat a person? Are any of you?”
He got up and circled the chair he had been sitting in, placing his hands on the back of it and planting himself there. “It was tropey. Something you’d be ridiculed for in creative writing class. Lestat the wifebeater, the love-bomber, the serial cheater.” He let himself take delight in the disclosure of his crude observations. “Frenchie Lestat, Indulgent, possessive, ill-tempered, flagrantly abusive. At times unhinged beyond the perimeters of suspended disbelief.”
“But you,” He gasped “With your yes, matire , Your talk of support and forgiveness like you’re fresh out of a marriage counseling session, your gentle hands slowly suffocating him over the course of a century.”
He lost the shit-eating grin he’d been sporting as knees buckled beneath him in one instantaneous, impossible motion. He fell to the ground so that he laid on his side, not the precise drop this motion had birthed in San Francisco.
He strained against the pain in his muscles while Armand approached his wilted body, the monster seemingly glowing with rage. “Manipulating him, changing his memories, killing his daughter and making him forget it, all the while telling him, convincing him, you love him, more impressive, that he loves you,” His own voice carried him through the pain. He was getting somewhere with Armand. He wasn’t sure where, maybe just his own funeral. “That’s interesting. You sure can spin a narrative like no one else, even if you did cheat a little with the brain washing.”
Daniel was lifted into the air and he thought he was going to be thrown across and slammed into the wall. But he was held there. Armand peered up at him, all carnage from the wall incident erased from his body. Could he do that at will? Had he kept it on initially for show, like a kid crying at a painless scrape just for the attention?
If Armand kept his gaze any longer Daniel thought he’d burned a hole right through his head. Instead, Armand summoned the chair in a flex of his… telekinesis? Did Louis have that? Is that what Louis had done to his hand or was that telepathy? His body dropped from midair into the chair, causing another earth shattering pain to travel across the entirety of his body, but not quite breaking the chair.
Armand’s sharp voice filled the air, “New York, 1986. Your first big apartment. Something pseudo-intellectual on the coffee-table, pink plush carpets in the master bathroom. Alice gave birth one month ago. She is not recovering quickly or well. The baby cries and cries. Your daughter seldom lets you so much as change her diaper without shrieking. Your wife is barely eating, it’s October and the trees are dying and your little family is failing.”
Armand’s voice took him there, he could see his living room, Alice in a powder blue smock, her hair disheveled, her eyes unfathomably tired. She looked half dead. She was still bleeding profusely every day.
“Despite your laughable contribution to the burden of caring for a new child.” Armand gritted his teeth, Daniel couldn’t help but notice through the haze, that Armand was not as agile or controlled in this exercise as he had been the first time. He was, impossibly, more wild. He clenched his hand around Daniel’s own, digging his claws into the skin there. “You’re tired. You feel sick, itching for a fix. You proudly haven’t touched the stuff in five years. Since a little after you and Alice got serious.”
It became clear that he was holding back earlier, he dug his claws deeper, penetrating the pale, liver-spotted skin.
“Her mother comes that weekend to take her upstate for some time. She arrives in a teal convertible, parks it on the street.”
Daniel whimpered loudly, barely holding back tears.
“When she comes up you’re holding the shrieking baby, Alice wanted you to hold her so her mother wouldn’t think you weren’t helping. Her mother gives you an all-knowing glare, a face you’ve never forgotten, you dream about it occasionally. What a failure of a husband, a father, a man. They leave with the baby.”
He pulled his nails out of him, producing a loud yelp from the old man.
He came close to Daniel’s ear, he thought he might bite it off, but he whispered,
“What happens that night, Daniel?”
He felt himself straining to contain it, Armand knew anyway. The real torture, more than punctuating his skin or throwing his body about the room, was making him say this.
His red-yellow eyes met Daniel’s, searching for the answer like he didn’t already know, “Where do you go?”
“The bar,” Daniel gasped.
Armand cocked his head, not good enough.
“The Saint.”
Armand smiled, “To score, as you say?” he questioned, fake jovial. He zeroed in “Ah, but not just.”
“You’re… playing with your food,” He croaked out each pained syllable. Armand showed no signs of stopping.
“There’s a boy there, can’t be older than twenty three. He’s thinner than you, pliable looking, that’s what you like in a man when you let yourself think about it. But he also looks like the type to partake.”
He was unrelenting in his narration of a night Daniel had tried to forget as soon as it had happened. “You offer to buy him a drink, he’s sweet. Meek, you wonder if you were wrong about your assessment, but he leads you to the bathroom, you crush lines with the department store credit card you used to buy baby Megan’s crib. But that isn’t all you’re here for.”
The bastard smiled, slowed his pace. His hand began creeping down Daniel’s neck.
“He tells you his name is Anthony, he’s studying to become a NICU nurse at school. You want him to stop talking so you run your lusty little hands over all his ass, like it’s yours. His mouth tastes like Tobacco, gin, bubblegum.”
Daniel screwed his eyes shut hard and tight. Armand brought him to his knees once more, this time precisely, holding Daniel up where he hadn’t before.
The monster stood over the mortal and made him look up at him in a gladiatorial display of power,
“Your wife is far away, nursing a newborn.”
He paused, smiled, made his voice high to mock the old man, “You let him take you in his mouth in the stall.”
Daniel somehow found the strength to retort, swallowing shame, cutting through the haze of Armand’s control. “Coke and sloppy head are on par with years of mind control, with child-murder?” He sneered, gathering breath. “The scale seems to escape you, I am a human man, I make human mistakes, human indiscretions. Your abilities and your pension to use them.” He dug his heels in, “You’re a fucking cosmic indiscretion! Toying with lives, shaping them for your own desires, taking them when you see fit.”
Armand feigned to consider this momentarily, “Did you not toy with Alice? Did you not chain Alice to you for a lifetime with your lies, by telling her you loved her? She loved you. Did you not know it and use that to your advantage?”
Daniel huffed, sick of this line of questioning, feeling like his body would give out any moment now. He didn’t want to die talking about this, “We got divorced.”
Now Armand condescended to him, “A child is a life tie, Mr. Molloy. Conceived under the false pretext of love, you thought of this when Alice told you she had not menstruated in two months. And three years later you made another. Wendy and Megan are tied to you, shaped by you-“
Daniel shouted over him, cutting his diatribe. Letting slip what had been obvious since the beginning, in his eyes at least. If he was going to die, he could die saying this. “You tried to be good, the only way you knew how and you still failed.”
He was shocked when Armand didn’t slam him against a wall immediately. “You tricked him and it still didn’t work. You believe in love, despite not knowing its taste once in your life. You believe in love and after all these years, all the lies, all the thankless loyalty, you know you’ve never had it.”
Armand did slam him against the wall then. His head collided with the previously unscathed area of the north wall of the dinning room. He kept going, the pain was incomprehensible. “So passive, so enigmatic, so seemingly-docile, all those charms you learned in your darkest days and still you were still second to Lestat, second to a boy in a bar in San Francisco.”
Daniel was coughing up blood, he hadn’t felt this young… well, perhaps ever in his life.
Armand was directly in his face now, those fatal teeth inches from his neck, huffing in rage.
“It was never about Louis, It was about not being alone. You’ve done all you could to make him stay. But you can’t, Armand. No one ever can.“
Armand fixed his hand around Daniel’s throat, enough pressure to hurt, but not enough to kill him unless this went on for sometime.
“Unworthy in San Francisco, unworthy in Dubai, unworthy in New York.” His voice boomed, perfectly smooth and controlled, “Unworthy of Alice, of Megan, of Wendy, of Anthony, Of Louis. Unworthy of a life of your own life, too unhinged, too indulgent to control it. Hedonistic little fuck.” His grasp on Daniel’s neck tightened.
He stared into Daniel’s blue eyes, searching once again. The only thought he’d find is I am going to die this time, I really am. But Daniel was fading in and out of consciousness.
“You want it,” Armand said suddenly. Disgusted, enraged, sucking his teeth, “Like you did in San Francisco.”
He released his grip on the boy’s throat, letting him drop to the floor. By a miracle, or what was more likely, Armand’s powers of physical manipulation, Daniel only coughed briefly, recovering fully within half a minute.
It was apparent he wanted Daniel to say something, do something, “Do you even know what time is anymore, Armand?” He began, trying to justify his reasoning for this unspoken desire he’d been trying to rationalize this whole time in dubai. He hadn’t wanted it to be like it was in San Francisco, but it already was. He might as well make him try to understand. Maybe he wanted to understand. “Can you imagine what it’s like knowing you’ll die alone, and soon?”
Armand stared blankly at him. This wasn’t taking.
“It might be akin to what you feel when you realize you’re going to spend eternity alone.”
“You fucked a hotel secretary in Las Vegas when your wife was pregnant with your second child.”
Of course he doesn’t want to understand, the second he gets triggered he’s back to the old supernatural parlor trick.
“Every morning, every night.”
Armand shouted over him, “You dropped your second daughter when she was six months old.”
Daniel followed just the same, “No Louis, no Lestat, no coven.”
Daniel tried to shut down this spiral the creature was trying to lead him down. I know I’m a piece of shit. I’ve known all this time. The worst he had on me he used in the beginning. Amateur.
“You pawned your first daughter’s music box to buy drugs when she was five.”
The old man pushed on, voice steady. “No one to want you. Because even after all these years, it’s the only way you know you’re alive. No matter how passionless, how dead-eyed, how manipulated, someone’s there wanting you. It’s gone now. What are you alone, Armand?”
Armand lunged toward Daniel, opening his mouth, teeth at his neck, about to sink in. Armand had him cornered completely.
The boy could hear his own heartbeat, he imagined how loud it must be for the creature.
Armand steadied his voice, “You’re in so much pain. I can see it.”
He ran his hands up and down Daniel’s neck, “I don’t have to convince you of much. You were desperate to live forever as a young man, to prove yourself. Ignorant of the world. You want to live forever now, but for what?”
“Maybe your book is very famous, then what?”
“Have you done it? Have you exposed some dark underbelly you’re always looking for, a reflection of your own?”
“Still a boy, fumbling in the dark for something to make his life worth all its pain, all the pain it has caused others.”
“Reaching around in oblivion for some revelation with no more accuracy than when he rolled around deftly in his marriage bed trying to please a woman he swindled his way into marrying.”
“But then,” He clutched Daniel’s face, running the back side of his hand along the line from his temple to the tip of his chin.
He had seemingly hit something in Daniel’s well of consciousness that hadn’t been there before. Daniel didn’t know what he had found. What could possibly give him pause before the slaughter.
“Here is a much changed man.” He said it as though it was a revelation to himself, but a plain fact all the same. “A man who wants a tie to something in this world like he didn’t before. A man aching for love, for touch. A man whose body is no longer the invitation it once was, once supple and soft,”
Armand sadistically landed his index finger on crow feet that bloomed out of Daniel’s right eyelid, “Now marked, hardened.”
Daniel was dumbfounded. He couldn’t fathom this switch. He certainly couldn’t believe something in himself had brought it on.
Armand stared far off, not meeting his eye. His voice cracked and raw, “Say I take you up on your wish, I can’t have any doubts. As a journalist, you know how important ethics are, I need you to leave me with no choice Daniel.”
“Anything,” Daniel gasped, not believing it, knowing it could be retracted in a second, “Anything.”
Armand refocused his gaze to the boy
“Open your mouth, Daniel.”
What was he going to do? What part of the ritual could this be? Would he tug out each of Daniels teeth? A vampire with fangs and fangs only?
“Do as I command.”
Daniel was completely paralyzed as Armand pressed his clawed thumb to Daniel’s bottom lip.
“Open please.”
Daniel found that oddly, he had to mechanically open his own mouth by his own volition. Unlike every other time with Armand, he was not physically controlling him.
“I am not going to do it for you. I will not try to control you at any point. This must be of your own free will.”
It felt archaic in this context, strenuous, having to move his own body. It felt so conscious, effortful.
Daniel opened his mouth fully.
“Good boy.” Armand sung, a jolt of electricity ran through the boy.
Armand took his index finger and inserted it into Daniel’s mouth gently. Before Daniel could think of what to make of this, Armand quickly thrashed a space between two of Daniel’s top teeth with his claw. Daniel groaned. The pain was sharp, localized. It felt as though a sunbeam or medicinal alcohol was burning into the small cut. Which brought to mind, was this sterile? Did it matter? this either ended with him dead or… he didn’t know. He instinctively closed his mouth and pressed his right hand over his lip.
Armand grabbed Daniel by the chin and moved his head to face the opposite direction.
“Put your hand down.”
Daniel’s hand would not move this time, much as Daniel wanted it to. The appendage began to jerk wildly. “I-I…”
“Sh,” Armand cooed. His honey colored eyes found Daniel’s and an immediate wave of calm overtook him.
“I can see now that you’re trying to obey me, Daniel. I appreciate your cooperation. I know this is a physical response outside of your control. Would you allow me to breach our agreement for one small moment, so that I may ease this pain for us?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Daniel.”
A cool sensation passed over Daniel’s entire body. What few thoughts he was able to hold before seemed to fizzle out of him, fade away into the static. There was only Armand’s hand on his own, his long dexterous fingers running up and down Daniel’s knuckles.
Armand flipped Daniel’s hand so that his palm was facing upward. His fingers encroached upon Daniel’s palm. Armand was holding his hand, he realized with some shock.
“I am capable of tenderness.”
He had forgotten, or rather not been able to remind himself in that moment, that Armand could hear him, his thoughts, even if they were not fully formed or legible to Daniel himself.
“Are you capable of tenderness, Daniel?”
He thought about it. He didn’t know if he was. Was tenderness the right word? Maybe he was just weak. Could a creature like Armand know such a distinction? Could the being still hear his thoughts?
“Yes,” He tried.
“Good. You should find you’re in control of your full physical body again.”
No. He had turned the telepathy off again.
“Open your mouth again please.”
Daniel hesitated, slowly separating his lips. Armand quickly moved at the opportunity, opening a new cut on his gum, mirroring the one on the other side of his teeth.
He hummed, watching the boy writhe in pain. “What does it taste like? The inside of your mouth?”
Daniel was glad for Armand’s restraint of his telepathy at this moment.
“Like iron.”
“I want you to feel pain, Daniel. Not because I hate you, but because this is how vampires are made. It’s how I was made.”
Armand’s voice was deep, rich, even without the coma inducing mind control. Maybe it helped Armand’s manipulations that he was so ethereal looking, even if he’d just been a man. If he’d met Armand as a man under different circumstances, perhaps he’d fall under the same spell.
“Not that I want to repeat the sins of my creator. Marius was…”
“An evil pervert,” Daniel assisted.
“I want you to feel pain because our lives as vampires are not painless. But I want you to tell me if you want to stop.”
“Then what, you kill me? How is that an out?”
“I did not say I would kill you. Do you trust me?”
Not at all, not in the slightest. You’re manipulative. You’re more evil than the other two. Ancient in a way I can’t comprehend.
“Not really.”
“Do you find me alluring?”
“Of course, you’re a hell demon with a couple of failed marriages. What more could I want for entertainment?”
Armand fixed his gaze on the boy, who at this moment felt impossibly old. Staring at Armand’s smooth face that had been painted for centuries, worthy of immortalization, he could feel the impression of every single wrinkle in his body, the thinness of his own hair, the aftershock of the tremors in his hands.
“Do you find me physically attractive?”
Daniel coughed, “Are you trying to humiliate me with this exercise? You haven’t done enough of that? You can read my mind.”
Armand stilled himself completely, he didn’t freeze per-say, his stillness seemed completely of his own conscious will.
“Not at this moment I cannot.”
Daniel circled, attempting to evade answering. “It’s never come up in the mind soup before? All those interview sessions, that I think you’re a handsome man.. god.. whatever you are?”
“I could not detect it so clearly over your shame. Why are you so ashamed, Daniel?”
“I-“ he began, searching frantically for anything, but he couldn’t answer it. couldn’t face it. It was too big for words. “I don’t.. I can’t.”
“Rest now,” Armand said, but the cool feeling did not wash over Daniel, only the calming effect of Armand’s unencumbered voice.
“I simply asked if you find me desirable Daniel, can you answer that?”
Jesus Christ. Can you answer that? Can you lay your human desire which already disgusts you at the feet of a superior creature? Could you just crack open your chest cavity with your bare hands? Could you bite off your own fingers real quick? It’s a very simple ask.
“Yes.”
The being arched his eyebrow, “Yes you can or yes you do?”
“Yes,” He swallowed the lump in his throat, “I do.”
“If you don’t trust me Daniel, can I ask you to trust your body for our purposes?”
Armand circled Daniel, the boy still sat in the chair. The being made his voice low and crouched a little his head close to Daniel’s neck.
“Can you lean into my touch? My voice?” His breath was hot on Daniel’s neck, producing goose flesh all up and down his arms.
Daniel was taken back to inexperienced times, high school, when a girl would kiss him just so that it left him unable to speak for a few moments after. He hadn’t felt it since he was maybe fifteen.
“I won’t do anything without your express consent, Daniel.”
Daniel choked and coughed, “You have it.”
“Good.” Armand said. “If you cannot trust me, I want you to be able to trust your desire. Do you want to trust your desire? Do you want to continue?”
Vampire consent dynamics, how quaint from a creature that gaslit his partner for 77 years.
“Yes.”
“Why do you feel humiliated at this?”
Daniel chuckled, where to begin.
“I do not want a quick-witted retort. I want an honest answer. Do you want to give that to me?”
“Yes,” Daniel inhaled, “You said it earlier, in so many words, I’m no longer an invitation. I don’t think I ever really was. And even if I wasn’t half bad in 1973, I don’t look like that anymore.”
Daniel sucked in his teeth and brought his head up, “Even if your eternal youth makes it so that you can’t imagine what that’s like, you must know the sting of unreciprocated attraction in some way by now.”
Armand turned his face away, going cold seemingly.
“Would you like to lay on the table?”
Daniel stared, completely nonplussed, at the being hovering over him.
“I assure you it’s quite comfortable.”
Daniel got up from his chair in a trance and came upon the large mahogany dining room table. He stopped in front of it, hesitant to lay, confused, as if sleepwalking.
“Would you prefer the bed?” The being offered, quickly as if it held no suggestion. Daniel burned with embarrassment.
“You and Louis’ bed?”
Armand smiled, “There is a guest room.”
“What are we doing?” He asked, feeling dumber than he had all evening, he didn’t think that was possible.
“What do you want to do?”
Daniel listened to his own thoughts to fuck you, he thought crudely.
“To live” he said, Armand probably wanted the more philosophical answer anyway by how he had said it. “To live forever.”
“This way,” Armand motioned to the guest room.