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Daniel had been in the penthouse nearly a week and a half but he had had very little time to explore. It had felt like he was being herded by “Rashid” and then Armand and Real Rashid, especially while Louis slept. He would turn a corner and one of them would be there, simultaneously glowering and solicitous, to escort him back to his room, the reading room, or the lounge. But for the past half an hour or so, he has encountered no one but the catering staff and he has found nothing of interest—a second guest bedroom, blank closed doors, and an industrial kitchen.
No swimming pool. His mind keeps circling back to that lie: eat, sleep, pray, swim. Armand certainly did not eat, sleep, or pray with any regularity when he wasn’t cosplaying as Louis’ PA. Did he swim? Perhaps ‘not quite a billion’ didn’t warrant a private pool. Perhaps no amount of cold, hard, cash mitigated the stupidity of constructing a pool at the top of a building that swayed and groaned ominously in the wind.
Daniel opens his laptop and pulls up the Al Seef Tower’s real estate listings. There is a pool here—somewhere. Logically, it would be a great deal closer to the ground. He closes the laptop and makes his way to the elevator, paranoid that someone will pop out of a doorway and stop him. But he isn’t a prisoner here. Yet.
Daniel hadn’t looked very closely at the buttons available in the penthouse express elevator on his prior trips in it, but there is a star, an L, and a P. Either this is too easy, Daniel is wrong, or Daniel has developed a massive bout of paranoia from spending too much time around two predators who were trying to fuck with his head to varying degrees and no one is trying to hide the fucking swimming pool.
Daniel presses the P button. Nothing happens. He sighs, returns to his room to grab the key card that let him back in the building when he was let out for lunch, and taps the key to the scanner. His hand shakes and it takes two attempts to jab the correct button, but once he does, the button glows and the elevator descends rapidly with its customary, unnerving, scifi woosh. Buildings have no business being this tall.
The elevator opens onto a dim, warmly lit lobby—floor, walls, and ceiling done in pink and gold marble. No helpful signs like a hotel, but clearly the right sort of place. He looks around a bit, finds the universal men’s restroom sign, pushes the door open, and enters a locker room. For lack of a better word. Everything is opulent and plushly carpeted despite the risk of mold and there are definitely no lockers, just a wall of large cubbies, one containing a neatly folded set of clothes on top of a pair of familiar black house shoes.
Daniel finds a steam room, sauna, and row of shower stalls before he pushes his way through a door to the pool room.
The pool is olympic sized, as advertised, but Daniel’s gaze is immediately drawn to Armand slicing through the water and showing a lot of skin.
A lot of skin. The tight, blue swim briefs leave his long, muscular legs entirely exposed.
You creepy old man, stop staring at him. But Daniel cuts his internal scolding short. Armand is a five hundred and fourteen year old apex predator, not Louis’ twenty-something fuck toy with an alluring attitude problem. There’s no power imbalance here. Or, there is, and it tips pretty fucking firmly in the other direction.
It’s a compelling line of logic, but Daniel startles so badly he nearly topples into the pool when Rashid appears in his peripheral vision.
“Fuck man, you’re not even a vampire. You have no reason to be that quiet. Do the two of them give classes or something?”
Rashid smiles with professional disinterest.
“Don’t give me that. You could have stayed—” Daniel gestures vaguely at the pool chair with an iPad and a bottle of water next to it that he had previously managed to overlook, “over there if you didn’t want to talk.”
“It’s the shoes; they’re very well constructed.”
“And watching Armand swim is part of your job description?”
“Armand prefers company for most activities.” Rashid is impressively condescending in his delivery.
“That’s a bit pathetic, paying you to hang out with him in the most boring way possible when his boyfriend is bored of him or sleeping.”
“You know he can hear you.”
“Yah. Could not care less.”
They are both quiet for several moments, watching Armand swim. It’s almost human, but there’s something uncanny about it—movements a hair too fast, too precise and fluid. He kicks off the wall and does some sensuous, wiggly thing across the whole length of the pool. From half remembered channel surfing during the Summer Olympics, Daniel’s pretty certain this is within the realm of things a human can do, but there’s something off about the specific movement, the effortlessness, the way it draws attention to how little Armand needs to breathe. It’s enough to make one's skin crawl. It does make Daniel’s skin crawl, but in a way that makes him glad he’s not in his twenties and certain parts of his body are far less immediately reactive than they used to be.
“It’s not exactly a hardship and it pays quite well,” Rashid says, not looking at Daniel, but Daniel’s looking at him now, grateful for the distraction. Rashid is standing with his hands clasped behind his back and Daniel can see the profile of a smile as Rashid watches Armand. His gaze is not sexual, but it’s also not not sexual. It’s reminiscent of how you might observe a particularly elegant piece of clockwork if you were into that sort of thing.
Rashid notices Daniel watching and stares back, somewhat annoyed but mostly unperturbed. There’s something off about Rashid in a very normal, human way, and Daniel is nothing if not curious. But he does have some tact—he’s not going to flat out ask what Rashid gets out of watching his vampire employer swim. Not when they’re having such a nice moment.
Sudden quiet breaks Daniel out of investigative journalist mode. The soft slosh of Armand swimming has stopped as Armand is now sitting on the bottom of the pool. It’s deeper than Daniel had judged and completely undisturbed by the bubbles that would rise from an alive body.
“That’s unsettling,” Daniel says, because he has to say something.
Rashid hums. “It’s fascinating how quickly the impossible becomes commonplace.”
Which sounds a tad bit ominous, like Rashid’s acknowledgement that Armand could kill them both easily and was only bound by social contract not to.
“How long can he do that for?”
“Longer than the tiles of the pool will hold water—in theory, at least. His body has no need of oxygen and a vampire as powerful as Armand would take centuries to starve to death. I’m not clear on the specifics, but a sufficiently powerful vampire can enter a near comatose state and be revived at some future point with just a small amount of blood.”
Daniel turns back to Armand’s motionless body and tries to tune out Rashid’s impromptu lecture on vampire biology—of all the things he’s heard this might be the strangest, most implausible, most unsettling—but it’s interesting that Rashid knows so much. It doesn’t seem like necessary information for a butler.
As if he had sensed the return of Daniel’s attention, Armand blinks his eyes open. They glow an almost red orange in the dim light of the depths of the pool and fix on Daniel as if they can see into the depths of Daniel’s soul
It should be terrifying. It is terrifying, but Daniel’s always had a whole slew of wires crossed and he has to bite his lip to suppress a gasp that would not have been entirely fear.
Armand pushes off the bottom of the pool with inhuman speed, and though he slows rapidly—seemingly through sheer force of will—as he approaches the fancy, lipless edge of the pool, he sloshes enough water to soak Daniel’s shoes when he breaks the surface.
“Rude, sir,” Rashid says once Armand has settled with his chin propped on the arms he has crossed over the tile.
“Apologies,” Armand replies, sounding not at all contrite. Armand repositions to ruffle his fingers through his hair, shaking loose excess water and separating locks of curls from his slicked back hair to flop across his forehead. He settles back into his earlier position and looks up at Daniel through his eyelashes, expression mulish.
This does a lot for Daniel, but, honestly, less than the siren act. Of course, Armand knows this. He can literally read Daniel’s mind.
Armand is playing with him. But Daniel’s not sure if he’s being played with as a fellow sapient creature or as a cat plays with a mouse before eating it, or, most likely, somewhere in between. It’s frightening in a way that has generally brought out the best in Daniel. (By some metrics, at least.)
Daniel crosses his arms and mirrors Armand’s expression back at him. Daniel’s too old to really pull that off anymore, but he’s not completely lost the art of it—the specific combination of flirty and grumpy that really gets you places with a certain subset of men. Armand gives him a closed mouth smile, which Daniel would bet today's per diem is suppressing an unsettling level of delight, before sliding his gaze over to Rashid and tilting his head to the side.
They come to some understanding and Rashid turns to Daniel and asks with his customary, flat professionalism, “What are you doing in the pool area?”
“Investigating. Which is my job,” Daniel says, unimpressed.
“I am not the subject of your investigation, Mr. Molloy,” Armand interjects.
Daniel raises an eyebrow. “You made yourself part of this story.”
Armand opens his mouth to argue semantics but Daniel cuts him off. “So you do swim regularly.”
“Yes. I also eat, sleep, and pray on a regular schedule when my companion’s whims aren’t interfering with it.”
“Right.” Daniel draws the word out long in a way he hopes Armand finds irritating.
Armand honest-to-god pouts. It’s an expression Daniel has often seen the edges of throughout the now joint interview, but to see a centuries old, blood-sucking monster full-on pout oscillates between viscerally off-putting and adorable.
Daniel crosses his arms in what he hopes is judgement and Armand’s gaze darts over to Rashid and then back again.
“You are incredibly rude, Mr. Molloy,” Armand says, levering himself out of the pool with something that vaguely passes for a series of motions a human body could make without the power of levitation.
Whatever snarky reply Daniel was about to make dies on his tongue as he is suddenly confronted with six feet of wet and nearly naked vampire within easy grabbing distance. Armand does look particularly grabbable, but Daniel is not that stupid. It does take active resistance, what with whatever is going on with his slender hips, ample chest, well-muscled shoulders and arms and chest. Chest. It hadn’t really been on display with how Armand was swimming and the distortion of the water, but Daniel had seen enough it should have prepared him somewhat. But Armand looks so slender and willowy with his clothes on—half unbuttoned shirts that show off his delicate collar bones and the shadow of well... that. That being well built muscle and a comfortable, human amount of body fat. It is the last thing Daniel was expecting despite the evidence. And alluring as fuck. What the fuck. Daniel cannot be thinking this. He is not actually interested in Armand. He is not.
Armand shakes his head—flicking water in Daniel’s face—and stalks back to the locker room, certainly using some vampiric power to prevent his feet from making any undignified squelching noises against the tile floor. Daniel is flummoxed enough to look to Rashid for moral support. What he gets is a dead-eyed, threatening look.
Daniel has to clamp down on the urge to hold his hands up in surrender. Like Rashid is Armand’s overbearing father or some equally insane nonsense.
“I’m not gonna follow him in there. Not interested in being literally eviscerated.”
Rashid, somehow, looks even more deeply unimpressed.