Chapter Text
It was a tiny blip of a memory, more a flicker of sensation than anything. It breezed past at what felt like absolutely random olfactory prompting, for the most part—rain on warm concrete, leather and tobacco, nag champa burning in a head shop to cover the old weed smell, expensive cologne in places where it shouldn't be. It could be something like a song, a sound, here and there, or an ache in his shoulder from laying the same way for too long.
The one time he managed to catch it in his hand was in the late eighties, maybe early nineties, during a heavy interview in the Village with a man who'd lost everyone he knew and still tended a garden on his balcony. Daniel liked the guy. He was keen, quick-witted but not at the cost of tenderness. He had a soft, nearly feminine voice, but with blue eyes so sharp they could make a lesser man flinch. Daniel almost did, when the questions got turned on him.
“Are you straight?”
Daniel winced in deliberation, clicking his tongue against his teeth.
“Straight feels like a strong word.” He admitted, loosely. “Can't say everything in San Fran was for coke.”
The man hummed thoughtfully, punctuated with a reasonable nod. He opened a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and offered one to Daniel, which he accepted.
It was a long, comfortable silence they let stretch after they'd passed the lighter back and forth. The sun was rising between buildings, and the light made his subject look older. Pale and drawn, though he wasn't sick. Just tired. The mousy brown of his hair suddenly looked gray, and gave the same tepid hue to his face.
“Have you ever loved a man?”
Then the flicker.
Laying flat on his back, cramped and crumpled somewhere they don't quite fit—the space not made for the lounge that they were attempting. Daniel only knows he's lying there with a boy because they're almost pressed chest-to-chest, and his legs are longer than Daniel's where they attempt to tangle below the knee. He can't see the boy's face, but he can feel the weight of his head somewhere that shoulder and collar intersect. He can feel hair that tickles his nose when he turns his own head to nuzzle closer. To mumble something with his lips pressed to his temple. He remembers thunder, he thinks.
The way he felt about it then was too hazy to cling to, and slipped through his fingers like smoke when he attempted to chase it. He was about to answer ‘no,’ because if he loved that boy he'd have a face and a name, but his astute subject took his long silence as answer enough. A hum. A nod. An agreement to not press for a more elaborate reply.
That was about the same level of detail that came to him when Armand had him pinned to the floor of the jet, his torso against Daniel's at the same angle. It came and went quickly, more likely prompted by the nonsensical near-death thought ‘Are you straight?’ when presented with perhaps objectively—maybe even mathematically proven—the most beautiful man in the world holding him down by one shoulder while he dug his pretty teeth into Daniel's neck. The shadow myth turned Stepford wife scorned, practically straddling one of his thighs while they pressed trunk to trunk, the set of claws in his hair keeping him tilted just the right way to drink from. The monster seemed pleased to be set loose, a low, inhuman sound crackling from his throat, suspiciously similar to purring.
Daniel couldn't help but laugh, high on adrenaline and the delight of being proven correct—as well as the death-throe nonsense image of a sleek black housecat, prim and proper, perched on the arm of a chair, though in a single leap and bound toward the jugular becomes a tiger with a bloodied maw.
What a way to go, really. This was way better than what he had planned before.
The same flicker, again, when he's brought up to a tiger’s throat, when curly hair tickles his nose when he tries to nuzzle closer. Practically purring with it.
It goes away for a long time, after that, which is fairly routine. Nothing to trigger it, and a hell of a lot on his plate for the next few years or so.
He had just agreed to do the documentary with Lestat, as skeptical as he was about actually getting anything worth half a fuck out of the guy. Really, he just couldn't keep doing what he was doing. The monotony as a human was one thing, but he was an old man with a routine. There was a comfort in it. Now he can't find a lick of comfort anywhere, in anything, in anyone—nothing fits anymore, like the world is too tight in some places and too empty in others. He had to just. Throw a wrench on the table.
A little young in the blood to be getting this existential, Danny Boy—you just need to get out of the house for a while. It'll be good for you.
He was cleaning his apartment a bit more thoroughly than usual in preparation for the long trip, remembering how stressful the return from Dubai was and then adding the clutter of the space on top of...all of that. He'd already packed for the road, and was now sorting all his linens out fresh from the laundry. Towels and rags tossed into their own pile as he untangled them from the fitted sheets, one from his room and one from the spare. Calling it a guest room felt arrogant. He didn't have guests. As he draped a top sheet over the back of the sofa, the music playing from the speaker changed—a song he'd heard a thousand times, but this time it brought The Flicker with it.
But it was way more than a flicker this time. Some of the edges had filled out from out, around, and behind, making it a sturdier thing that could stand under its own weight. Something strong enough to grab, grip, and grasp at him.
It had teeth and claws, now, to match his.
They were laying in the back seat of Daniel’s car, the bench not quite wide enough for two grown men to lay side-by-side, but there were boxes and leather suitcases in the floorboards stacked high enough to make up the difference. Daniel drove cross-country when he decided to leave San Francisco, that would have made it around ‘77, maybe ‘78? He didn't know where they were or why they had stopped, he didn't know where he met the boy or why he was there with him. Knee-jerk, journalist type questions, the who/what/when/where/why. But he didn't think of those until after.
Because for whatever reason, this time the memory felt like taking a fucking stake to the chest.
His heart was pounding against that boy's, so quick that he had to have noticed it, pressed together like they were. Despite his rabbit-like heart rate, his hands were slow and steady where they laid over a cotton-veiled shoulder, fingers petting in gentle strokes and nonsense patterns over a white cotton t-shirt. Sweet. Gentle. Daniel, sweet and gentle—with all evidence to the contrary...but here it was. That boy was calm and still, relaxed in a way that felt huge and delicate, like maybe it was a rarity to witness.
The car smelled like leather and weed. The boy smelled like incense and expensive cologne. The open door that their tangled feet dangled out of let in the smell of rain on warm earth, but their legs stayed dry. Thunder rumbled, distant and sweet, like it was purring.
And the radio:
Now here you go again
You say, you want your freedom
Well, who am I to keep you down?
Back at the apartment, Daniel had at some point sat down on the couch, eyes wide and unseeing, one hand clutching the laundry on his lap and the other with his fingers pressed against his own mouth, because he can feel it,—the way it felt to press words directly into that boy's head, lips to the temple, hair tickling his nose. Daniel was aware he had bloody tears trailing down his face, threatening the laundry he'd just done, but he felt frozen in place.
Because he loved that boy. He loved him, with more depth and intensity of emotion than he had ever managed to scrape up as a husband, with more tender care than he could ever work up to as a father.
What kind of fuck up forgets someone that made him feel like that?
In a lot of self-help group-talk type bullshit, there's always a dreaded point where they ask you to think about your happiest memory. Daniel had always assumed the heroin kind of fucked up his receptors, that he'd burned through the parts of his brain that signal for this and that, etc. Later he blamed it on the Parkinson's. He didn't have a happiest memory. Even when he considered himself fairly content, nothing would come to mind. He'd always just offer a believable lie, or wait for other people to talk long enough that he didn't have to.
But here it was. The beautiful, horrible depth of the thing. How could he have forgotten it?
“I knew who I was without those pieces.”
“Side-step the big picture. Get the story straight first.”
Get the story straight, get the timeline, inch slowly outward from what he knew to fill in the blank edges. Do it now, while it's close, while it's fresh.
But he couldn't. All he could do was sit frozen, with his eyes locked on the chipped paint of the floor trim, and let the song play out.
...
Running with Armand was weird.
A good weird, he thought. Definitely a relief after so long spent on that rancid bus, with the constant noise and flashing lights grating on the still-raw exposed nerve of his fledgling senses. The contrast between that and playing errand boy with the rest of Armand's grim-faced lackeys going about the grim-faced vampire dailies—Daniel practically had a spring in his fucking step.
It had been a point of pride, in the beginning, to lean into the anger of abandonment as much as he could. The indignation and the insult of seeing bait set out right under his nose knowing damn well he was going to take it. But if rolling over and showing his belly meant being allowed close enough to study Armand like a bug, he was going to take it. It was only a matter of time before Daniel doth tire of protesting too much.
He had notes, in case there was a chance at some far flung future interview. Or that's what he told himself.
Fastidious and particular, but not vain. Knows what he looks like and its old news, basically. Dresses to hide his shape, but never looks sloppy or ill-kept. Different from Dubai?
Follow-up on unspoken vampire animal displays, ie the Neck Thing.
Lobs his hair off at the chin when it starts to piss him off, grows back after he's fed. Feeds with no particular frequency, but savors it with a near obscene slowness.
Can count on one hand the number of times I've seen him with his teeth out.
Speaks at least a dozen languages, including Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. Does he remember the root language, or did he relearn them? Rotates between the full dozen as needed on video conference calls that don't seem vampire-related. Try to listen in, but I get sleepy. He doesn't seem to mind that I'm in the room.
He was on one of these conference calls now, in Daniel's apartment of all places.
Lestat had gone to ground and had been off the radar for a while now, and as such, their rival vamp group took what time they could to recuperate, gather intel, and grow their own numbers by collection rather than creation. It was the calm before the storm, but the anxiety wasn't landing on Daniel like it probably should have. Neither did the dreaded gray monotony of being back in his New York apartment yet again.
Most likely because no matter how dull and gray a Brooklyn February at the end of the world could be, having a six foot tall gangly vampire perched and tangled like a pretzel to fit onto a single couch cushion to take a Zoom call in his house clothes was pretty novel.
They'd taken a break from the day-walking lessons, given that it was 8 am and looked as black as night with the weather like it was. The streetlights were still on, even. Daniel wasn't sleeping so much as lightly dozing—the other form of vampiric sleep coming very easily to him by way of having a few decades of Old Man Experience under his belt: catnapping.
He was perfectly aware of the entire room. He knew the angle the sleet was hitting the windows. He knew the exact timing of the flickering of the three candles Armand had lit, and could see them through closed eyelids. He knew the neighbor above him was running late for work but kept stopping in front of the TV, likely looking at the weather, and seeing if they could use it as an excuse to just not go in at all. He knew Armand was biting his thumbnail, because he could feel the reverb from where his own socked feet were tucked underneath the cushion he was sitting on.
Armand didn't look to be what Daniel would describe as “business ready” though he was, of course, incapable of looking bad. His hair was half drawn out of his face, curls in all different patterns because he'd slept on it wet. He was wearing loose, linen pants, and one of Daniel's more worn-in flannels from the back of the closet, untucked from his pants and not quite buttoned all the way up. He was in a business video call in what was barely a step up from pajamas. Maybe he wasn't on camera at all? No, it seemed like there was a sticker over the camera.
Not like Daniel could see the whole screen from this angle. He could be watching a Twitch stream for all he knew.
He didn't question Armand on much of anything really, which seemed to actually put Armand on edge—half the reason he didn't, actually. Let him squirm in the quiet every once in a while.
It just seemed like the thing to do, to follow him around. It was nothing at all to bring him back to New York with him, in their vampire recess. Cohabitation was easy, for the two of them. They're both fucking weirdos. As long as Armand cleans any evidence of weird science from the kitchen sink, and as long as Daniel takes his shoes off by the door, they get along like a house on fire.
And here they were, snug as a bug in a rug on two sides of the same couch Daniel had his first vampiric emotional breakdown on, all those months ago.
And—so listen.
Listen.
Daniel did...suspect it.
Maybe suspect was a strong word. It was more like the questions that needed to be asked to ascertain whether or not it was a possibility would creep up his cerebellum, and he would smash them down with a cartoon mallet if they managed to peek their stupid heads into his frontal lobe.
How do you forget someone that made you feel like that? Well, there was another memory that he had to pick and peel and scratch at to reclaim not all that long ago. A whole person he didn't remember meeting. The same precise edit on two brains, if you will.
It just—if he was in Investigative Journalist Mode, it would warrant investigation. But if he was right, that meant there was more. And the picking and peeling was satisfying, but sometimes it would bleed a little. Or a lot, if what he almost-suspected was as load-bearing as it seemed. And he was comfortable, at the moment. Not lonely. Hadn't he learned when not to pick? He didn't want to end up chasing Armand if he ran him off. He liked him here. He liked this, right now. He even liked the fucked up Maker-Fledgling thing.
It was happening right now, though it was a bit more subtle when they weren't in a crowded street. They were already alone.
It sort of felt like a Chinese Finger Trap. Daniel wasn't pulling on it at all, at the moment, so his side felt open. Easy-breezy. He was attempting to share the chilled-out vibes he had acquired on this side of the couch with his slightly high-strung maker, who wasn't pulling on the finger trap but he wasn't pushing on it either. He's got the metaphorical garden hose in a grip, not wanting to let go, but he's put a crease in it so the flow is messed up.
Or something like that. One of those analogies surely made a coherent picture. He didn't care much to dig deeper just right now.
More people joined the Zoom call, it sounded like, as the flow of conversation shifted to English and began with various greetings and welcomes. Turns out, the meeting was something about authenticating a handful of paintings recently unearthed from some sprawling estate's estate sale—making predictions, first and second thoughts, qualifications and who best to gather and make the speculations in person. After a round of debate and then agreements, a very posh sounding woman stayed in the call with Armand, after the rest had logged off.
Another agreement and a final farewell. Armand closed the laptop with a sigh and leaned to place it on the coffee table. He went back to his previous perch after, and resumed biting at his nail, likely staring blankly at candle flame if Daniel had to take a guess. He peeled his eyes open. Yep, there he was.
That Chinese Finger Trap was an imprecise science that it seemed only Daniel felt was worth experimenting with thus far, but trying to talk to the guy right now would be like trying to talk to a brick wall, so he just stayed where he was and sent waves over the line. Frequencies. Not thoughts, obviously, but feelings. Contentment. Calm. Things meant to soothe. It didn't seem to help much, because some of the nervousness might have been about Daniel. Every time Armand cautiously attempted to open that bond fully, he closed it back. Like he was scared of it.
“Are you getting all twisted up about taking me somewhere, or about leaving me behind while you go somewhere?” Daniel managed, though it felt like trying to speak through gravel. And to a brick wall.
“More the latter than the former, I think.” The wall finally spoke, soft and lovely, a tone that matched the room.
“You know I'm down for whatever.” Daniel replied, which was mostly true. Maybe entirely true. “You need to do art business with art people without leaving the Vampling unattended? I'll tag along if you want me to. As long as I don't have to be well-versed in like—favored canvas materials in the 17th century or anything.”
It earned him a huff through the nose, but not much in the way of relaxation.
“It'll be the Indian Museum in Kolkata, authenticating pieces for them as well as representative curators for the British Museum.”
“I’d like to upgrade my response to actively begging to be in that room.” Daniel confirmed. “Are you nervous about being in Kolkata?”
That earned him a scoff.
“No, I've worked with the museum a dozen times. What makes you think I'm nervous?”
Then it was Daniel's turn to scoff.
“You made me, asshole—I literally feel what you feel but you keep pinching the other side. It's like having a rock in your shoe. So what gives?”
Daniel’s side of their tuning fork continued its active coaxing, while Armand's did something that could be described as warbling. Like a trembling lip. Curious but cautious. Desperately hopeful, but scared of what a blow might feel like. Wounded, maybe.
It was absolutely fucking heartbreaking, and it wasn't even the full flood of the thing.
“You've just—.” Armand tried, biting his lips, looking at Daniel, then away. “...you've been very sweet over there, is all. Like you're glowing. But at me.”
Daniel melts.
And it's his fault for taking a very important puzzle piece with as much salt as he did, the one freely given, bravely so for all the good it did him: Armand told him he loved him, and hasn't so much as brought it up since. He keeps that garden hose in a clenched fist on purpose, constantly on guard, to avoid what? Coming on too strong? Something so innate and subconscious, and Armand has been operating it manually? Was that not exhausting?
But the root of the thing: Armand was nervous because he wanted to be closer to Daniel, and did not know if, or how, he could pull it off. And Daniel was a cynical asshole, but he's not fucking made of stone for Christ’s sake.
He immediately threw two of the back cushions into the floor, making room for himself to scooch and wiggle further into the crack of the couch, which left more room on the cushion with his arm outstretched across. To his horror, his voice did crack with a bit of sadness when he spoke up.
“That's all? C’mere, then—just-.. Come here.”
He didn't even give Daniel time to worry that he'd misread the situation. It was faster than a blink that Armand had snatched the other throw blanket from the loveseat and launched himself into the space offered up for him. He kept his arms tucked close to his own chest, hands clenching the blanket close to his own face, but his long whip-cord legs were out to wrap around Daniel's under the other blanket. He couldn't have gotten up if he wanted to, and he really didn't think he did.
Because he was absolutely certain that he had that boy in his arms. The one in the car with the rain and the thunder and the radio:
It's only me that wants to wrap around your dreams, and have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
The shaky inhale followed by a long steady exhale of someone walking back from the edge of crying was mirrored on both sides, Maker and Fledgling. Noticing that they'd done it meant it took a few repetitions to actually walk back from the edge of crying, but eventually they got there.
Daniel wrapped the same arm around the same shoulder, he knew it was the same. He traced the same nonsense patterns with the same fingers, minding the sharper additions. He turned to bury his nose in the same head of hair—wild and curly, that's why it tickled.
“Thank you.” Armand mumbled, tiny even on the great heaving sigh it rode in on. But it rubbed Daniel the wrong way, like he was doing him a favor.
“Hey, none o’ that.” he scolded. Or attempted to scold. The effect was lost with his mouth pressed to his hairline, softened twice over with a kiss placed to the same place. Thrice over.
They do eventually settle. With rain and sleet pattering on the window, other doors in the building opening and closing, sometimes gently, sometimes not. Car engines. Crosswalk timers. Muffled. Soft.
Daniel was just about on the brink of death-sleep when he remembered what he said in the back of the car, nervous and rabbit-hearted, and so happy that it almost made him tremble. He remembered how long he spent working up the courage to speak out loud, even if it'd still be heard either way.
“I'm absolutely gone on you, baby—you know that?” Barely more than a whisper, something they could lose in the rain if they weren't careful.
It was both a disappointment and a relief, the few moments without reply where he thought Armand didn't hear him over the radio and rain, or that maybe he really was asleep.
But no. He sounded just as wobbly as Daniel.
“...baby?”
“Yeah, baby—my baby.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Love, love, love, he loves this nightmare of a boy. He can't say it just like that, it doesn't come out right, but he knows Armand can hear it anyway. There's barely any room for another thought in his head. He doesn't cling like he wants to, though, even if he knows his grip would be easy to break out of.
But Armand doesn't go anywhere.
He brings himself closer, if it were possible, hiding his face in the collar of Daniel's jacket. An elegant hand, carefully and cautiously placed where Daniel's heart was beating out of his chest like it wanted to be held outside the ribcage.
“And you're mine?”
Daniel huffed, a smile so wide it hurt his cheeks even though his eyes were wet.
“Yeah, I'm yours. I think I might always be yours, if that's alright. I'm all yours.”
All Armand had to do to get those tears to spill was press the smallest whisper of a kiss into his cheek. It was the happiest he's ever been. Even with the car broken down and not a soul around for a hundred miles.