Chapter Text
A fire in a concrete coffin isn’t as deadly as in a wooden theater, but Daniel heads for the extinguisher all the same. Louis might know about cloud storage; he might not. Plausible deniability is, as ever, the name of the game.
Armand lies in his periphery en route, curled up like a dying spider. One life-threatening hazard at a time, Daniel thinks.
When the laptop is vanquished, when he’s picked up its still-warm corpse and walked without thought to where Armand still lies, he realizes these hazards look alike: each covered in a blanket of dust, each with a light dying from within. Near-death situations make you florid, his editor had always said. From all the bullshit he’s heard these past few weeks, he assumes the reverse is true for vampires. Spend an immortal life over-insulated from consequence or conflict and you start to think you’re Shakespeare. You stage Beckett in the Bowery of Paris; you elevate breakfast to an art. And you never, ever kill your darlings.
“All that,” Daniel says, “and he still takes you at your word. I wish I were that fucking confident you wouldn’t drain me.”
“I never gave my word,” Armand says. His voice has always reminded Daniel of a snake—cool, smooth, and venomous—and it still does, though Armand has never lain battered below him before, or had so much as a hair out of place. “I never said a thing.”
“Oh, we care about the details, now?” Daniel says. “That’s new.”
Here’s another editor special: Daniel Molloy never met a bear he couldn’t poke. It originated, probably, in the short gap between the second Pulitzer and what he had called in some longform self-reflection—the sort common to most overblown writers running out of ideas—his third, and most acrimonious, divorce. Armand only looks at him, so, suck on that, dear ex-editor. Go scribble in someone else’s margins for a change.
Besides, there’s only one thing you need to learn, as an interviewer, and it’s patience. Everything else comes with time—and, when you’ve learned to wait, chances are you’ll still be there when your talent comes to join you.
Three observations come to him as he stares Armand down. The first is that Armand is not blinking. It feels like a response in itself: you may be a fascinating boy, but you lack my gifts—but as gifts go, it isn't compelling. The mind gift, the flame gift, the flying gift—and the gritty-dry-eye gift? Be serious, buddy.
Daniel might raise a brow, and Armand might tilt his head slightly to regard the change in his expression. Neither of them might move at all. Who cares? The second thing Daniel notices is a trail of blood that starts from a gash in Armand’s cheek and is moving at consistent speed towards the corner of his mouth. Armand moved his head and set it on its course; he didn’t, and gravity was tugging it there already. Daniel wonders if a vampire’s own blood proffers any sustenance, or at least comfort. Could Louis have bitten his own tongue in the dark grasp of his confinement? He must have known it wouldn’t sate his hunger—but perhaps he’d been so desperate he was willing to pretend.
The third thing is that Daniel’s hand is shaking. This detail is very clear. Armand’s head turns (perhaps for a second time), and so does the drop of blood, which trickles off toward his neck and runs out of juice in the soft gap between jawbone and earlobe.
“Go on,” Armand says, “Let it fall. Your enfeeblement cannot do it any more harm than has been done already.”
With rewards like that, patience doesn’t feel like so much of a virtue. Enfeeblement, Christ. Who talks this way?
“Yeah. Can’t bring this one back by feeding it rats or dripping blood on it from above.”
Armand’s dusty face cracks into a terrifying smile. Instinct—the same instinct that had him step back when Louis stepped forward, before he realized his hand was outstretched—tells Daniel to mimic. Reply in kind, some prey part of him says, and he will let you go.
Yet his hand is shaking. He is a dead man already. He can trust in old habits, and if not Armand’s word at least Louis’ threat. He can wait.
“It takes one to know one, Mr. Molloy,” Armand says. He still smiles, though fewer of his teeth are on display. “Yes, your personal computer is dead, but what of its contents? Do they, perhaps, live on?”
Daniel shrugs. He might lose grip of the laptop; he might drop it on purpose. Armand’s smile stretches once more.
“Mingled drafts,” he says mildly, as though teeing up another of the practiced observations Daniel had to suffer during their interview. They’re fully off-script now, though, so nothing springs forth. Armand gestures, instead, to the scene on the floor between them. Sam’s play was a less-than adequate cushion for the laptop, whose screen, beneath the extinguisher’s powder shroud, now lies dark. The top-left of the keyboard has fused in the flame to form one new QWEASD key. It smells cancerous.
When Daniel looks up, there’s more blood on Armand’s face.
“What, you had to misdirect me to chop some onions?”
Armand’s eyes narrow. In an instant, he is standing; in another, he is crowding. Their mingled drafts crunch under his feet. The dust in Armand’s hair is so fine the effect is like dye. On his skin, it still carries the cracks formed by that too-wide smile. How would Armand look if he had been condemned to age? Who would he be?
“Do not,” Armand says, “doubt the strength of my feelings. Doubt everything else, ruin everything else, but do not call me a pretender or I will gladly kill you and, by doing so, myself.”
Daniel, very carefully, rolls his eyes. Armand presses the tip of his tongue firmly against the bottom of his upper teeth, and inhales. Thin ice, Mr. Molloy.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel says, and raises his hands in surrender as though it’s true. “I’m sorry, I am, but—me, ruin everything? You’re lucky it lasted as long as it did, man. Louis wanted to believe you, it’s as simple as that. He isn't stupid. He knows as well as I do that if you had enough power to silence the coven, you had enough power to rule them still, no matter your unruly companion. You gave him all the pieces he needed to figure it out. Why not cut them out like you did our little encounter, huh?”
“He asked me—” Armand says. His fangs have dropped. For a dead man, Daniel feels very alive. It felt like this when Louis talked about sending Lestat to the dump, or just a minute ago, when he got to do his Poirot shit at the dinner table. Journalism is the closest a mortal gets to turning people into prey.
“Oh?” Daniel says. Armand freezes, mouth open in a snarl. “And here I thought I was entitled to doubt.”
He takes a step back, and another, though he doesn’t turn away. He’d seen a video once of this guy who met a cougar on the trails and backwards-shuffled the whole way home, never breaking eye contact, hollering all the way to try to convince himself, at least, that he was not in danger.
“Careless of him,” Daniel says, pointing over Armand’s shoulder at the hole in the wall. “You guys know how much indentured labor it took to put this building together? I would have thought you two might give a shit about that sort of thing.”
Armand blinks at last. In vampires, blinking is a placeholder gesture. Actors might fiddle with a prop to remember their line; tennis players might bounce and rebounce the ball before their serve. Armand blinks a second time, and his expression shifts to one of familiar, restrained violence.
“I would wonder how you dare,” Armand says, “but in a penthouse full of vampires you manage to go for the jugular more than either of us.”
“High praise,” Daniel says, voice as dry as he can manage. “So are you gonna eat me, or can I get to packing?”
Armand’s own voice remains resolutely liquid. “I would have given you an easeful death,” he says, “back when you were a fascinating boy rather than an upstart old man. I would have drained you blissful and stupid and dead. You would have wanted it nearly throughout. If I am forbidden from killing you, well—”
“You won’t be outdone by Santiago? Or was the whole ‘buried alive forever’ thing your idea as well, really?”
“You will die,” Armand says, eyes flashing. “The Parkinsons won’t kill you, not directly—but it will cause you to trip on a crack in the road, and you will hit your head and lose your wits before your life. Or it will make your muscles fail you as you eat, and you will choke to death on something inglorious and human: half a Dorito; some leftovers from a sad solo meal you will have on the day a daughter marries. It is as you suspect: she will not invite you. She will joke to friends that you are bad luck where marriages are concerned.”
“She’d be right,” Daniel says, looking pointedly to the busted wall behind them. “It’s nice to hear you’re as much of a fabulist about the future as the past. Reassuring, you know?” He shrugs again. “Everyone dies, Armand. Even vampires. You may be immortal, but you’re all so fucking messy you might as well not be. You’re burning and slicing and staking each other left and right.”
Armand mimics with a shrug of his own. “And yet I have lived for centuries,” he says. “Why is that, do you think?”
Daniel laughs. “You won’t like it.”
“Humor me, Mr. Molloy. After all, you are in no danger.”
He laughs again. “Fine. Fine, but only since I’m in no danger.”
To test the premise, then, he turns his back on Armand and heads toward his room. Armand stalks behind.
“You were meat,” Daniel says, “In your human life. You were hunted, sold, and used. Louis carried with him his shame and loneliness; why wouldn’t you drag your prey instincts along into immortality?”
Behind him, Armand’s feet fall silent. He could be levitating with rage, for all Daniel knows, but he doubts this as he does almost everything. He turns back to find him startled to a freeze.
“You heard Louis,” he says, “I have to pack my things.”
Armand starts after him before Daniel has taken three more steps.
“What prey instincts,” he says, “were on show? What aspect of my betrayal evokes a frozen creature in the headlights? I did not merely witness, you said: I directed.”
“Maitre,” Daniel says. In the director’s cut of this scene, he would turn around to see Armand’s expression. In the only take he has, he doesn’t think to do it. “Boot-licking. Face down in the coffin.”
He’s in the room now, throwing careless drawer-loads of clothing into his case on the bed. “I’m not saying that’s all of it—that’s a symptom. You have a self-preservation streak a mile wide, Armand, and the power to make good on it more than any frightened rodent ever could. You’d sacrifice a limb if it would let you get away unscathed.”
Armand grabs him by the shoulder and yanks Daniel to face him. “I sacrificed Louis,” he says, “But I let him live, after. He slept in his coffin and asked me to wake him when it was dark, and I did. I could have killed him then—why didn’t I?”
“You sacrificed Claudia, too, remember her?” Armand’s fingers grip his shoulder far too tight. His face is such a mess of blood and dirt that you could almost forget the ageless skin below were it not for the eyes and the still-lowered fangs. Daniel has never felt less afraid. “Look, don’t ask me to tell you shit you already know. He killed your entire coven, or near enough. He made himself your only option for companionship. He knows what you are—he knew he could hold you up as a gesture to Lestat and say ‘hey, this guy’s a fuckin’ rebound. I’m only screwing him to screw with you’, and that you would play the part as asked. And nothing’s changed! He ran into the sunlight in San Francisco and you saved him for your own sake. You let me live, before and now, because there’s nothing better on the horizon than Louis. You were cursed to live forever, granted an endurance greater than you could ever have imagined when you wished for it as a human, but you need someone to endure with or you’ll have to pay attention and realize how fucking terrible it actually is. Fuck, ow. Louis told you not to touch me, you know.”
Armand releases his grip, but does not move his hand, which hovers above Daniel’s shoulder in a petulant gesture that reminds him of schoolyard bullshit. And, sure enough: “I did not touch you in San Francisco,” Armand says, “though you were more than amenable to the suggestion, if I recall. I did not need to. I could fling you into any walls I chose with a mere thought. So I would advise you to think carefully, Mr. Molloy, before you wade into semantics. Yes?”
Daniel remembers Armand feeding on him in San Francisco. Whatever. There are other battles to pick. He shrugs. He regrets it. The bone is crushed. How had he failed to notice?
Armand catches his reaction and smiles a smaller, more genuine smile. “Well, pack your things, then. We both heard Louis, after all.”
Armand wants him to struggle through it, one-armed. He wants Daniel to let the pain consume him until he becomes a display, a broken, tortured thing Armand can simply patch up and dump at a hospital somewhere, memories safely wiped. But what about what Daniel wants, huh?
If he is not in true danger, if he is simultaneously a dead man already, and if ten million dollars is truly on its way to his account, then there has never been a better time to go for broke and lose. Daniel shrugs, again, with exaggerated care, and as though testing the sensation rolls his head from one side to the other, stretching the muscles between shoulder and spine. It’s agony. Armand withdraws his hand from the distasteful display.
“You’ve fucked me up, Armand,” he says, “But you have a conscience, right? You wouldn’t turn Madeleine. You wouldn’t turn anyone. A little torture, a little death, that’s fine, but god forbid you make anyone live like you: why is that?”
He waits, but Armand waits, too, narrowing his eyes. The pain has its own pulse, now, and it radiates from Daniel’s shoulder in terrible, thought-blinding waves. Ten seconds, twenty, and Daniel’s legs refuse to hold him upright; he collapses backward onto the bed. As he does so, his forearm hits the case beside him, and perhaps he cannot help the noise that escapes him.
“A little torture,” Armand says. Daniel thinks he sees a gleam of fang still-present. “Yes, a little torture. It is a temporary thing. Any injuries from torture cease on death. And death, of course, perhaps especially a little one—”
Daniel is bleary with the pain, of course. It makes him stupid, right? Again, he tilts his head away from the injury, sighing into the pain of the stretch. “Huh?”
“What I mean to say,” Armand continues, blinking, “is that death is an ending. I must live without one—unless, like you say, I am staked or slashed or set aflame.”
Daniel winces as though the prose pains him more than his wrecked shoulder. “Bullshit. I didn't use so much needless alliteration.”
Stretching out his neck like this isn’t the best position for stealing glances, but an agonized squint allows Daniel to catch the flash of irritation in Armand’s eyes.
“Okay, I get it. You don’t have an easeful death lined up,” he says. “But neither do I, you said, thanks to my enfeeblement. But hey, at least I can go out there and date. Humanity isn't exactly a level playing field—but I’ll be rich, anyway, which puts companionship on easy mode. And in any case it’s better than the vampire curse, right? Lestat and Louis are fucked up god-subject soulmates—how can you compete with the maker bond? So sure, all right, you’ve convinced me: no one has suffered more.”
The hand under his injured shoulder is so numb it might as well not exist. Daniel cannot think about it. He brings his free hand to the muscles he is stretching and begins to palpate them gingerly. If he groans, he groans.
Daniel is flexing still wearier muscles than these. He learned patience in his San Francisco days, sure, but there are things he had forgotten from then, too—for example, that there is value in appearing a certain level of earnest. He isn't sure it works the same way at his age, but he abandons the squint anyway, looking up at Armand with something equal parts open and false.
“Seriously man, I feel for you, I really do.”
“Silence,” Armand says. Daniel’s throat locks up. He stares at that dusty, blood-streaked face and smiles. Armand’s fangs have been out nearly the whole time.
The fingers on his neck stop their exploration and find, instead, the jugular—it’s just like you said, Armand, I’m a natural—tapping on it once, twice, three times. Armand’s nostrils flare. Daniel is gripped by the memory of tying two condoms together to form a tourniquet and thinking man, this is a far better use for these things. Who needs sex? He always used to tap his veins like that, as well, like: testing, testing, one, two, three. It might be long-dead muscle memory, again, that has Daniel buzzier than he’s ever been. He is going to score. It’s going to be everything he needs. If you just let him—if you just give him—
“Poor little doe-eyed vampire,” Armand says, “is that it? Feed him his own sob story, and offer yourself up as the solution?”
Silenced, all Daniel can do is shrug, though it’s almost as painful as forcing words might be. Even his moan of pain is caught before it leaves his mouth. Armand’s eyes flick to his larynx, which flexes with phantom sound.
“Why would I turn you? You have been at the scene of two of the worst moments in my relationship with Louis—have in no small part caused those moments—no, silence.”
Daniel, who had only raised a brow, now risks a smirk.
“This is what you do. You react. You hold a mirror up. Even when you say nothing, you being here changes everything. Why should I want that for eternity?”
It is extremely hard to unbutton a shirt with one functional hand—pointless, too, with the crewneck underneath. Daniel tries anyway. Armand watches him fumble like one might watch a dog shit on the rug. Armand is breathing through his mouth, too, to round out the image.
“If you die human, you disappear. You cease to be an issue in a couple of decades.”
Armand retracts his fangs. He presses his lips together. Even the blood and dust seems to rearrange itself to something more composed—and then he blinks once, twice, three times.
“If I die human,” Daniel says, voice croaky, but restored, “then I die his. He’ll own the story; the interview will be his, and your betrayal will be published worldwide. If you turn me, if you make me yours, you do to me what you have shied from doing to anyone. You punish me for—in your view—ruining your very solid and honest relationship, and you obey the letter of Louis’ law.”
“If I turn you, you will undoubtedly still publish your slop and all its biases wholesale. Do not pretend to be anything other than what you are.”
It feels more like a negotiation than another command, not least because Daniel has the voice to respond.
“Yeah, I’ll publish it. That will cause some problems. And I’ll probably try to hunt some billionaires, too. If I can put eating the rich into practice I figure I probably should, you know?”
Daniel is used to Armand paying him dirt, but not to this extent. His expression remains entirely calm, which can only mean there is far too much calculation being performed to risk any equation showing on his face.
Eventually, Armand lays a hand upon Daniel’s ruined shoulder. The mere weight of it is enough to make Daniel’s breath come quicker. Temporary, he thinks. A little torture is temporary.
“And Louis?”
“What about him?” Daniel asks.
“How will he react to such a situation, do you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a habit of making shit up. That’s your domain, right?”
Armand smiles. Forget Cialis; all Daniel needs is teeth in his neck and he’s harder than he’s been since the last time. It’s counterintuitive, with blood flowing away, but there isn't much that makes sense, with vampires. It’s part of what makes the journalistic endeavor so fulfilling.
Anyway, fuck that. Now all he has to do is concentrate on not pissing Armand off too much, during, and being drained for the trouble. Already, the pain is fleeing from his shoulder. Already, his head is growing fuzzy. Armand is drinking from him with a fervor that exhilarates and terrifies. He wonders if Armand knows that turning him will not sate his hunger. Daniel wonders if nonetheless he’s desperate enough to pretend—but he tries not to wonder it too loudly.