This is going to go so bad. Say no, he tells himself, Who cares if his asshole feelings are hurt.
"I'll call a cab."
Close enough.
It's not the weirdest taxi ride of Daniel's life — no one is having a bad acid trip or currently vomiting — but it's putting in effort towards the podium. But they survive, and Daniel's apartment building is still there, along with his overstuffed mailbox (last time he asks Jessica next door to pick it up for him, he was even paying her), which he empties before leading Armand up the stairs to his door.
Nothing out of place inside. No overhead lighting anywhere but the kitchen, but also none of the lamps match, warm yellow paint on the walls, blue skies and clouds on the ceiling, an oddball collection of 'art' decorating here and there that runs the gamut between 'actually art' and 'something neat Daniel found'.
Feels good to be back, he finds. There's an itch in him suddenly, the desire to sleep in his own bed, even though that life is behind him.
"Not a penthouse," he says, tossing his keys towards a dish on the table out of muscle-memory habit, "but better than a shithole in Divisadero."
Of course he has. Has moved like a ghost through Daniel's apartment, ignoring the overflowing mail, ably avoiding lurking alarm systems. He does not recall it in great detail, having not turned on any lights and skulked around with vampire vision. Opened this or that cabinet, inspected wall hangings and books and the overflowing storage closets, sat crossed legged on a patch of floor and contemplated destroying just everything in reach—
But he hadn't looked up, or if he had, maybe he just didn't remember. Now, as lamps cast warm light around, Armand's focus draws up to the ceiling. Blue skies, fluffy clouds, daytime and summer.
"Did you have that done after the fact?" is dry, not a real question. Vampire joke.
A strange feature for any civilian home to have, the kind of thing that's reserved for a gimmicky lounge or a deeply upscale museum, nothing as unremarkably in between as some writer's Brooklyn apartment. If he's renting, he definitely didn't have permission, if he's owning through a co-op, he's hilariously devalued the property, for corny decor.
But he likes it, and the ceiling's high enough that it works well. So. Whatever.
"The painter was cute and wanted the practice. I developed a temporary sinus condition in response to inhaling fumes and had to stay in a motel in Long Island for two weeks while it dried."
This sounds like a story about a pretty girl; the painter was a 45 year old Belarusian man, and Daniel convinced himself he was practicing his rusty language skills and helping somebody out, not staring like a repressed psychopath. Honesty is not a tactic. He doesn't know why he tells Armand, other than he tells Armand because he's stalling, and he knows that, and he knows Armand knows that, even though neither of them can read the other's mind.
"A rudimentary di sotto in sù fresco," skips past that So, uh... along with an effortless flex of Italian. "More charming than architecturally convincing, but the dimensions are limiting."
Armand has seen enough cute murals in his life, flipped enough properties with ill-considered decorative elements, that he isn't immediately transported to the Renaissance by egg shell blue, swirling clouds. But still. Funny. There is, within him, an entire world of painted ceilings, of lurid colour, old world maximalism and perspective from half a millennia ago, and it is all contained at the bottom of an ocean, a trench within that ocean, where it is crushing and black and cold.
Amusing. He moves through the space, back turned to Daniel. Just as he'd left it. Both he's. "I don't particularly want to involve glassware or novelty mugs." Maybe if it's very fitting. World's Okayest Maker. "How neat are you?"
Daniel watches Armand move, the way he looks at things, and it takes a second, but he can tell the difference between 'looking to discover' and 'looking to check'.
Oh, you motherfucker.
But why say anything. He knows Armand has been in his spaces before, coming into his hotel rooms during the day, leaving things, people. A breath in, a sigh out. Doesn't explain his exasperated expression. World's Okayest Maker content is fine motivation for it anyway.
"It's been a few months since I've accidentally ended up with a horror movie blood fire hose," he deadpans. "I tend to want to avoid putting myself in situations where someone's going to ask why I look like I've murdered someone."
Answers, from cantshutthefuckupguy, before he fully thinks through what Armand is saying. The admission of wanting to avoid that step of removal strikes him as odd.
"I don't know how much you'll need, but you will, only once you've had it. I'd prefer to be efficient."
Rather than opening a vein into cup after cup. The injury is not large but it is delicate, and it feels reasonable to Armand to explain rather than have to muddle through protest as to the intimacy of the thing—even less dignified than a novelty mug. The problem being, he does like this. He hadn't been pretending for Daniel's sake, across the table. Performing, sure, but it had felt good and satisfying to serve in that specific way.
To sate a hunger, that time. To heal, this time. Maybe it will feel the same. Maybe it won't. They hate each other.
And so, unease threads up Daniel's spine, even as something else - an animal instinct he's never experienced before, but that he recognizes as being from the part of himself that didn't exist a year ago - tells him to shut the fuck up and say yes, that he wants it, that it'll be good, that he doesn't understand how good, his transformation was disorienting, but he's not disoriented now.
"Will I?"
A real question. Curiosity instead of stalling.
"Will I know, I mean. I've never stopped except to keep from accidentally killing myself on dead blood. I'm sure you'll have no problem stopping me, I just. Uh. Do you think I'll be able to tell?"
Or will he just try to consume Armand like a wild animal until he's shoved off? The thought is unsettling.
It's a real question, so Armand treats it thusly, considering it.
Meanwhile, shrugging out of his coat, laying it over the back of a chair. "You're young," is true, and there is no irony in saying so. "Unpracticed. Perhaps not. But I imagine you should feel slightly better, which you can take as a sign you've had enough. If you have the discipline, you can stop then. The rest of the healing occurs when you bed down for the day."
Unbuttoning a sleeve cuff, rolling the fabric back to expose a perfect plane of unblemished skin. A kind of funny visual reversal—the dealer, exposing his forearm for the junkie, the tempting ridges of arteries showing themselves when he turns his wrist.
"Otherwise, yes, I can stop you. Are you asking because you'd like to use a vessel?"
If he has the discipline, can stop then. Armand is either being passive out of linguistic habit, or some part of him is leaving the door open to Daniel taking more than he strictly needs, even with the caveat. Daniel thinks of the blissed-out expression while Louis was attached to his throat. If he were less earnestly interested in learning all the fine grain details of this, he might run after that hunch, try to pare down on learning something about Armand personally instead.
A shoulder-devil voice in the back of his head suggests he'll learn one way or another anyway, if they do this.
Daniel watches him peel parts of his wardrobe back. Thinks, unwittingly mirrored, of the same junkie inversion. He preferred putting it up his nose or smoking it over injections, for a number of reasons, but he'd take it how he could get it at the end of the day. The imagery grabs him somewhere both vulnerable and powerful. Addicts never actually stop being addicts, they just pause the madness with enough work, and Daniel has always liked working on work over anything else.
"I'm asking because I want to know."
And of course, he can just do it to know, but also Armand is here to explain, and it's obvious that Daniel is struggling to engage with this. But he is struggling instead of just shutting a door on it, and after another moment of just looking at him, he turns to take his own coat off in a signal of acquiescence. Alright. He detours to the kitchen to wash his hands, because that seems to be polite, and when they're in front of each other again he's ditched his glasses as well. Smaller without the coat, just some guy, black shirt with the sleeves unevenly pushed up, nervous but intent. His resolve to just shut up and do it has emboldened an inhuman instinct in him that wants to scream with it all, but Daniel is shutting that up, too. Be normal he instructs himself, which is pretty fucking insane.
Armand, perhaps, deflecting because it is difficult to explain. Not just on the basis of how honest he is inclined to be, but also, he has had no elders to drink from to soothe his wounds, and he can't anticipate what it should be like. Not since his maker, being healed from near death twice over—from his illness, from the brink of bloodless death, and that took more blood than anything anyone has ever needed from him.
And what else can he say? That it simply feels correct, that he should give in this way? Daniel's blood is already his own, and now it will be a little more.
Correct, efficient, reparative. He has avoided saying he might enjoy it. He has avoided saying that he hasn't enjoyed being alone.
He's the one to step nearer. They can do this standing. It seems correct too, somehow, rather than making himself all too comfortable. Turns his hand and offers his arms, low enough that Daniel will have to take it into his hands and bring up to his mouth. Still a vessel, in a way.
Same blood, same mind, heartbeat, feeling. Daniel looks at him.
Don't be a pussy, Molloy.
Fine.
He's right handed and so he follows the instinct to reach across for Armand's right hand. Fingers slide down his wrist, holding it, and his left hand comes up to support it. The pattern he draws with his fingers is not unlike someone looking for where to stick a heroin needle, only the barely-there ghost touch of pointed nails. Considers for a second continuing to be halting, asking Where, specifically, but thinks Armand would have limited his options if he had a precise answer of his own.
Transforming had been disorienting, yes, but he remembers in strange painted images, drawing from his wrist, cradled close. His thumb rests on Armand's pulse, then lower, pausing for a moment as if hypnotized by it. The pull for this isn't like hunger for a human. A subtle difference but it's there. The undead lizard-brain doesn't say food, but it still says yes. Fangs in his mouth already, and he realizes he can't quite pinpoint when they lengthened.
With one hand on the back of Armand's and the other wrapped around just above his elbow, Daniel draws him up and leans his head in, and sinks sharp predator teeth into his maker's wrist.
A bodily betrayal, in the split second before Molloy's teeth break his skin: a warm, internal, eager shiver that courses up through him, stupid and uncontrolled.
Stamps it down, eyes closing. His other hand rests on his elevated bicep, a steadying kind of counterbalance to the pressure of a vampire bite, to Daniel's hands, to the sense of gravity that Armand all at once feels in him as soon as blood begins to draw through his veins. Watches all the while, unable to look away.
If Daniel doesn't precisely remember, maybe it will be recalled anyway, how deep and rich Armand's blood tastes. Psychological, surely, it's only blood, but a vampire's ability to taste a person's life means that blood recording half a millennia of history has a certain kind of potency, a power. Blood is not food, blood is elixir, is ambrosia, is liquid life.
He thinks he remembers, but as soon as Armand's blood is in his mouth, memory is laughable. (A different kind of monster.) His blood defies a sarcastic, blunt writer's description, because 'taste' doesn't cover it, there is something more than that— all food makes serotonin, all addictive foods make dopamine, and he's found blood to be similar but greater, and this even greater still.
The thought comes to him as fast as it leaves his head: He's not going to be able to stop. He's not going to be able to tell when he feels better, because his mind is now utterly consumed by this. They can't read each other's minds but he feels Armand himself in the blood, like suddenly the silvery, strange bond is a physical thing, red now, liquid, alive, exquisite, and it's like his teeth are set into that and not something as inconsequential as a wrist.
Unconscious movement takes Daniel's right hand from Armand's arm to his side. A belated echo of the thought that's left him, a kind of warning, an earmark for eventual help. Still drinking, a spiral of flying ecstasy — not honey and pineapple, how fucking nothing is that, he's like a fire, like you imagine smoke might taste if it became tangible, burnt sugar and ice and colors — and that touch, that touch that says, hey, I am completely fucking checked out, I am not going to be able to do anything about it, this note is reaching you from somewhere else.
Armand is already still when Daniel touches him, but goes more consciously so. Reads it for what it is, which is not necessarily better than a sudden show of familiarity.
Transmitted through the blood, perhaps, this sentiment, this warning, this signal that assistance is or will be needed. On the hand currently trapped by closed jaws, his fingers flex, stretch, but the angle doesn't allow him any incidental little brushes of contact. He watches him drink, watches the way his throat moves as he swallows, watches the fine details of muscles in Daniel's face, where tension asserts itself consciously around his jaw, unconsciously at his brow.
A fledgling's hunger, maybe, just as Daniel warned him about. Louis, a hundred years on, with the careful rituals they'd created together, still exercising enormous willpower to detach himself.
Except he can feel it as well. Not as well, he's sure, if it were his fangs in Daniel's flesh, but feels it like a physical thing, a thread that winds straight from his centre of his being, down his arm, past Daniel's fangs. Not from his heart, no, something less rudimentary than a single, mindless muscle—his nervous system, perhaps, endrocine, the strange chemical makeup of his being, signals and electricity now flooding into his fledgling's body.
Feels a swoop of lightheadedness. Whoops.
He places his other hand against Daniel's face, a thumb that strokes alongside the corner of his mouth. "Enough," he says. "Daniel. Listen to me, let go."
More force can be applied, but for now, a coaxing.
There's a sense of finally being a complete ecosystem. A closed circuit that was previously missing a connection ring. Tranquility somewhere even in the midst of a vortex of devouring hunger and the different-pleasure-than-pleasure. Is it arousal? A high? Something else, something beyond it? It must be. There's the blood, and it's the blood of another vampire, and it's a vampire with depth enough to drown in, and it's his maker. The bond between them doesn't feel like a string of fate, from here, but a pool they're both standing in, and he doesn't need to dig in and discover any of his secrets because they both exist here in the same biome, and anything aside from that is irrelevant.
Daniel, in a voice that should be saying Mr Molloy. A light touch.
It's like—
Then, but then was fine, too, in its way.
He doesn't have Louis' experience or Catholic vegetarian willpower. He does have an addict's history, and an ingrained, if old, fail-safe protocol to just fucking listen if someone tells him he looks like he's about to OD. That's the emergency button he hits for this, even though the process of withdrawing certainly takes longer than he thinks it does. Armand can see him start when it does, though, his touch getting firmer as though steadying himself, eventually shaking through him to lifting his head away from the elder's wrist. Blinking, swaying.
Blood on his mouth, eyes bright. Whatever color they are, it's currently a perfect mirror to Armand's.
A little excess blood trickles around his wrist before the worst of the punctures seal up deep, saving the rest. Instinct has Armand lift his arm so that this little, diminished river continues its path down his arm rather than to drip on the floor. He could probably use his other hand to stem it as well.
His other hand is busy, though, still resting warm against Daniel's cheek as Armand tips his head, studies his face, looks into eyes that have gone a golden-red, more earth than fire, like Baltic amber, still bright. A stroke of his thumb glides along blood-slick lips, feels the remnants of fang at the edge. Pushes just enough to test its sharpness, as if he wasn't just well acquainted.
Relents, hand gentling, still with a spread of contact, fingertips to jaw. Feels a storm of urges. He has already given into enough of them for one night.
"Sure," he says, like better is both obvious and assumed, and like he has far more important priorities to think about. Because he does. Addict-brain in full swing, caring for little beyond paying overly close attention to the hyperfixation potential in front of him, and following the very very good feelings he's experiencing.
Armand looks like a very decorated cosmic body. A black hole, but not the dismissive, crushing, thing he once accused Daniel of being, but something that centers reality into it. Christmas lights around something velvet-dark.
"Do you want any?"
Manners. Sure, he can down everything hidden in a backgammon box. But it's polite, and that's why you get high with other people. Sharing the experience.
The world tilts a little as Daniel asks this thing.
Standing stable and all, but like a readjustment has to happen inside of himself. A glitching kind of moment in which Armand reflexively attempts to divine what the correct answer is, his own competing desires and sense of control all disorganised within him. Blood dries in a wandering path down his arm, collected as a smear at the elbow.
"Yes," he says. Because he does.
And he would like for it to all be pared down just as simply as Daniel makes it seem. Feels in his own mouth the slight ache that comes with fangs growing sharp, that comes with wanting to bite down.
The hand lingering at Daniel's face turns outward. A tip of his head follows a gaze scraped down to where he knows fat veins lie down the side of a warm throat.
A day ago, Daniel would say he'd never offer. He'd balk at it like he balked at Armand back outside of the house he'd been touring, no matter how curious he might have felt. An hour ago, he would want to, but still maybe he wouldn't— just to be fucking respectful and try not to make it weird.
But that's out the window, because he feels incredible, and hesitation has been stripped away and the most annoying facet of his personality, the fearless hedonist part, just thinks: well of course he should offer, it doesn't matter how fucking dangerous Armand is or how this might twist things up between them, it would simply be crazy to withhold.
Armand's hand on his face, fingers practically in his fucking mouth. He tastes his blood still. He could take more, he could take it forever.
He tilts his head back in a plain offer. His own hand is still at his maker's side.
"Come on."
Been in Daniel's apartment before, been in Daniel's throat before. This time he's asking for it. Come on.
Armand's eyes don't do the thing very often. The bloom of black pupils, a predator's gaze, but not never. Sometimes, when he feels like chasing something, when it doesn't matter at all that his prey might be able to detect the thought, because the prey is already hysterical and running for their lives. Otherwise, it seems like a tell. He has better control than most.
They widen a little here, drinking in the sight. The invisible thrum of pulse beneath offered skin. Come on jerks in him like a hook caught in his belly, will have to consider later whether it's because it has the vaguest hint of an order or simply because of the recklessness of the words themselves. Feels like a tiger being teased.
Imagines, for a split second, leaping, tearing.
Does what feels like the equivalent, and steps into Daniel's space. Catches his hand in his hair, another to keep his chin so positioned and turned a little aside. Delicately applies his fangs on skin, a dainty twinned piercing sensation followed by the more intimate press of a warm mouth to throat.
Armand looks like the monster he is as he steps closer, and it makes Daniel's pulse hammer faster— fear has always been an improperly connected wire in him, and dying hasn't untangled it to a healthy position. Impossible to tell the difference, in his moment, between terror and excitement, and he's flying somewhere on molten silk clouds far beyond an ability to inspect it.
A bite, pain that isn't really pain at all, and Daniel makes some small, gasped sound, hardly aware of it. One hand on Armand's side, the other pressed to his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt.
He had wound his arms around him, too, in San Fransisco. Sympathy for the devil, or a flicker of action before death. Here, Armand can feel him, see himself as Daniel sees him, and it isn't quite that he's beautiful— he's a centerpiece of reality, maybe Daniel sees too much of him, but he isn't afraid, not even of the parts that cut into his hands when he picks it up to look at, and he isn't repulsed, even when he's so fucking pissed off.
It feels good to be fed on. Did he believe it? Not quite this much. Jesus fucking christ.
One could imagine a plan afoot. (A thing with syntax.) Laying a trap that would hurt Daniel, laying in wait, pretending at surprise, offering the blood, being offered the blood, all to lead to this moment. That would be an absurd thing, of course. Armand knows a little bit about how the world works, which is a series of random collisions, violent rearrangements, and the knowledge that to survive the downward spiral of entropy, one must (the impersonal pronoun) make whatever decision is necessary in the moment to survive it.
He also knows that he doesn't appear that way to any of them. All of them in love with narrative meaning. Armand had given Louis that narrative. Louis, determined to rewrite it. Daniel, pen in hand.
All this to say: he might agree with the potential for his own conniving narrative coherence on account of this experience being so very good that it seems impossible for him to not have taken it on purpose. That it should just fall into his hands.
His hands hold Daniel fixed in place as he drinks, long, languid, vampiric swallows, eyes closed. If his own blood is addictive for its age and lineage, then maybe the closest he can come to experiencing it is in his fledgling. But it isn't that, not really. It is what it was already when Daniel was human, the breadth of his perception. He had thought, fifty years ago, of the dense crushing weight of gravity, of his story being swallowed down, unmade and unspooled. It might have been.
It might even feel nice. Drinks, thinks of tape tangled around fingers, pulling him in. Thinks of the single droplet of blood, Daniel unconscious and Louis behind a door, that he'd collected out of a pool, tasted, as he listened. Of the half sip he'd managed before he'd been made to stop. Of the gluttonous draining, finally, well earned, on the floor in Dubai. Armand had put his arms around Daniel as he'd died. The urge is there again.
The grip of his jaw gentles. His fingers gentle. Responsible, neat, he presses his mouth against puncture wounds to collect the last of what oozes from them as they close.
A writer doesn't exist in the narrative. Outside of it, watching, road-building. A journalist stands in the middle of the narrative with a magnifying glass (normal journalist, middle career), or a tape recorder (bad journalist, early career), or a fucking sledgehammer (good journalist, now and again).
Armand could have just dropped him off a ledge and then loomed over him until he asked for help. Armand could have just thrown Claudia out the front door of the theater one morning. Daniel isn't sure that Armand knows why he does things. Daniel wants to sit here with the fucking sledgehammer.
Things to think about later, when he's not cranked out of his mind.
Almost a protest, when Armand pulls away. Surely it's there in the spam of his hand, but he's not pushy about it. Hey man, finish the fucking line, and he's not suicidal, hey, why don't you actually just drain me, wouldn't that be fun.
They are standing very close. A naturally romantic configuration, still cradling Daniel's face, other hand curled around the back of his skull. Strange to think that something so uselessly ordinary as a kiss would make more undeniable alterations to this thing they are doing, and something as deeply intimate as blood drinking
well, they're fucking around. Irresponsible. Armand has less excuse, but maybe also every excuse. No rules, no laws, no commands.
Blood trapped in the creases of his lips, and a messier smear of it on Daniel's mouth. This, Armand studies, before he makes the mistake of flicking that focus up, meeting Daniel's stare, the question it holds. Armand steps aside, around, letting him go on the same motion as he moves for his coat, loose shirt sleeve flapping open at the wrist.
Armand withdraws, and Daniel is still in space, but something tilts and says no, that's not how it should go. Buckles up against the fact that Armand should be allowed to bolt if he wants to, and that Daniel doesn't know what he'd do if he stayed anyway.
Want to watch a movie?
Want to make out?
Yeah, great, that'll work.
His hand is on his maker's side until the last second, until Armand is too far away, even with Daniel's arm extended. Lingering atom by atom, off of his hand, his fingers, the little clawed tips at the ends that exist now because of Armand. Daniel lets him go, even though he could stay, in this questionable apartment with mismatched lamps and a tacky ceiling.
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no subject
This is going to go so bad. Say no, he tells himself, Who cares if his asshole feelings are hurt.
"I'll call a cab."
Close enough.
It's not the weirdest taxi ride of Daniel's life — no one is having a bad acid trip or currently vomiting — but it's putting in effort towards the podium. But they survive, and Daniel's apartment building is still there, along with his overstuffed mailbox (last time he asks Jessica next door to pick it up for him, he was even paying her), which he empties before leading Armand up the stairs to his door.
Nothing out of place inside. No overhead lighting anywhere but the kitchen, but also none of the lamps match, warm yellow paint on the walls, blue skies and clouds on the ceiling, an oddball collection of 'art' decorating here and there that runs the gamut between 'actually art' and 'something neat Daniel found'.
Feels good to be back, he finds. There's an itch in him suddenly, the desire to sleep in his own bed, even though that life is behind him.
"Not a penthouse," he says, tossing his keys towards a dish on the table out of muscle-memory habit, "but better than a shithole in Divisadero."
no subject
Of course he has. Has moved like a ghost through Daniel's apartment, ignoring the overflowing mail, ably avoiding lurking alarm systems. He does not recall it in great detail, having not turned on any lights and skulked around with vampire vision. Opened this or that cabinet, inspected wall hangings and books and the overflowing storage closets, sat crossed legged on a patch of floor and contemplated destroying just everything in reach—
But he hadn't looked up, or if he had, maybe he just didn't remember. Now, as lamps cast warm light around, Armand's focus draws up to the ceiling. Blue skies, fluffy clouds, daytime and summer.
"Did you have that done after the fact?" is dry, not a real question. Vampire joke.
no subject
A strange feature for any civilian home to have, the kind of thing that's reserved for a gimmicky lounge or a deeply upscale museum, nothing as unremarkably in between as some writer's Brooklyn apartment. If he's renting, he definitely didn't have permission, if he's owning through a co-op, he's hilariously devalued the property, for corny decor.
But he likes it, and the ceiling's high enough that it works well. So. Whatever.
"The painter was cute and wanted the practice. I developed a temporary sinus condition in response to inhaling fumes and had to stay in a motel in Long Island for two weeks while it dried."
This sounds like a story about a pretty girl; the painter was a 45 year old Belarusian man, and Daniel convinced himself he was practicing his rusty language skills and helping somebody out, not staring like a repressed psychopath. Honesty is not a tactic. He doesn't know why he tells Armand, other than he tells Armand because he's stalling, and he knows that, and he knows Armand knows that, even though neither of them can read the other's mind.
"So, uh..."
no subject
Armand has seen enough cute murals in his life, flipped enough properties with ill-considered decorative elements, that he isn't immediately transported to the Renaissance by egg shell blue, swirling clouds. But still. Funny. There is, within him, an entire world of painted ceilings, of lurid colour, old world maximalism and perspective from half a millennia ago, and it is all contained at the bottom of an ocean, a trench within that ocean, where it is crushing and black and cold.
Amusing. He moves through the space, back turned to Daniel. Just as he'd left it. Both he's. "I don't particularly want to involve glassware or novelty mugs." Maybe if it's very fitting. World's Okayest Maker. "How neat are you?"
no subject
Oh, you motherfucker.
But why say anything. He knows Armand has been in his spaces before, coming into his hotel rooms during the day, leaving things, people. A breath in, a sigh out. Doesn't explain his exasperated expression. World's Okayest Maker content is fine motivation for it anyway.
"It's been a few months since I've accidentally ended up with a horror movie blood fire hose," he deadpans. "I tend to want to avoid putting myself in situations where someone's going to ask why I look like I've murdered someone."
Answers, from cantshutthefuckupguy, before he fully thinks through what Armand is saying. The admission of wanting to avoid that step of removal strikes him as odd.
"Is a cup too tacky, or something?"
no subject
Admittedly. But not the point.
"I don't know how much you'll need, but you will, only once you've had it. I'd prefer to be efficient."
Rather than opening a vein into cup after cup. The injury is not large but it is delicate, and it feels reasonable to Armand to explain rather than have to muddle through protest as to the intimacy of the thing—even less dignified than a novelty mug. The problem being, he does like this. He hadn't been pretending for Daniel's sake, across the table. Performing, sure, but it had felt good and satisfying to serve in that specific way.
To sate a hunger, that time. To heal, this time. Maybe it will feel the same. Maybe it won't. They hate each other.
no subject
And so, unease threads up Daniel's spine, even as something else - an animal instinct he's never experienced before, but that he recognizes as being from the part of himself that didn't exist a year ago - tells him to shut the fuck up and say yes, that he wants it, that it'll be good, that he doesn't understand how good, his transformation was disorienting, but he's not disoriented now.
"Will I?"
A real question. Curiosity instead of stalling.
"Will I know, I mean. I've never stopped except to keep from accidentally killing myself on dead blood. I'm sure you'll have no problem stopping me, I just. Uh. Do you think I'll be able to tell?"
Or will he just try to consume Armand like a wild animal until he's shoved off? The thought is unsettling.
no subject
Meanwhile, shrugging out of his coat, laying it over the back of a chair. "You're young," is true, and there is no irony in saying so. "Unpracticed. Perhaps not. But I imagine you should feel slightly better, which you can take as a sign you've had enough. If you have the discipline, you can stop then. The rest of the healing occurs when you bed down for the day."
Unbuttoning a sleeve cuff, rolling the fabric back to expose a perfect plane of unblemished skin. A kind of funny visual reversal—the dealer, exposing his forearm for the junkie, the tempting ridges of arteries showing themselves when he turns his wrist.
"Otherwise, yes, I can stop you. Are you asking because you'd like to use a vessel?"
no subject
A shoulder-devil voice in the back of his head suggests he'll learn one way or another anyway, if they do this.
Daniel watches him peel parts of his wardrobe back. Thinks, unwittingly mirrored, of the same junkie inversion. He preferred putting it up his nose or smoking it over injections, for a number of reasons, but he'd take it how he could get it at the end of the day. The imagery grabs him somewhere both vulnerable and powerful. Addicts never actually stop being addicts, they just pause the madness with enough work, and Daniel has always liked working on work over anything else.
"I'm asking because I want to know."
And of course, he can just do it to know, but also Armand is here to explain, and it's obvious that Daniel is struggling to engage with this. But he is struggling instead of just shutting a door on it, and after another moment of just looking at him, he turns to take his own coat off in a signal of acquiescence. Alright. He detours to the kitchen to wash his hands, because that seems to be polite, and when they're in front of each other again he's ditched his glasses as well. Smaller without the coat, just some guy, black shirt with the sleeves unevenly pushed up, nervous but intent. His resolve to just shut up and do it has emboldened an inhuman instinct in him that wants to scream with it all, but Daniel is shutting that up, too. Be normal he instructs himself, which is pretty fucking insane.
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And what else can he say? That it simply feels correct, that he should give in this way? Daniel's blood is already his own, and now it will be a little more.
Correct, efficient, reparative. He has avoided saying he might enjoy it. He has avoided saying that he hasn't enjoyed being alone.
He's the one to step nearer. They can do this standing. It seems correct too, somehow, rather than making himself all too comfortable. Turns his hand and offers his arms, low enough that Daniel will have to take it into his hands and bring up to his mouth. Still a vessel, in a way.
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Don't be a pussy, Molloy.
Fine.
He's right handed and so he follows the instinct to reach across for Armand's right hand. Fingers slide down his wrist, holding it, and his left hand comes up to support it. The pattern he draws with his fingers is not unlike someone looking for where to stick a heroin needle, only the barely-there ghost touch of pointed nails. Considers for a second continuing to be halting, asking Where, specifically, but thinks Armand would have limited his options if he had a precise answer of his own.
Transforming had been disorienting, yes, but he remembers in strange painted images, drawing from his wrist, cradled close. His thumb rests on Armand's pulse, then lower, pausing for a moment as if hypnotized by it. The pull for this isn't like hunger for a human. A subtle difference but it's there. The undead lizard-brain doesn't say food, but it still says yes. Fangs in his mouth already, and he realizes he can't quite pinpoint when they lengthened.
With one hand on the back of Armand's and the other wrapped around just above his elbow, Daniel draws him up and leans his head in, and sinks sharp predator teeth into his maker's wrist.
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Stamps it down, eyes closing. His other hand rests on his elevated bicep, a steadying kind of counterbalance to the pressure of a vampire bite, to Daniel's hands, to the sense of gravity that Armand all at once feels in him as soon as blood begins to draw through his veins. Watches all the while, unable to look away.
If Daniel doesn't precisely remember, maybe it will be recalled anyway, how deep and rich Armand's blood tastes. Psychological, surely, it's only blood, but a vampire's ability to taste a person's life means that blood recording half a millennia of history has a certain kind of potency, a power. Blood is not food, blood is elixir, is ambrosia, is liquid life.
Except when it's human. Then it's mostly food.
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The thought comes to him as fast as it leaves his head: He's not going to be able to stop. He's not going to be able to tell when he feels better, because his mind is now utterly consumed by this. They can't read each other's minds but he feels Armand himself in the blood, like suddenly the silvery, strange bond is a physical thing, red now, liquid, alive, exquisite, and it's like his teeth are set into that and not something as inconsequential as a wrist.
Unconscious movement takes Daniel's right hand from Armand's arm to his side. A belated echo of the thought that's left him, a kind of warning, an earmark for eventual help. Still drinking, a spiral of flying ecstasy — not honey and pineapple, how fucking nothing is that, he's like a fire, like you imagine smoke might taste if it became tangible, burnt sugar and ice and colors — and that touch, that touch that says, hey, I am completely fucking checked out, I am not going to be able to do anything about it, this note is reaching you from somewhere else.
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Transmitted through the blood, perhaps, this sentiment, this warning, this signal that assistance is or will be needed. On the hand currently trapped by closed jaws, his fingers flex, stretch, but the angle doesn't allow him any incidental little brushes of contact. He watches him drink, watches the way his throat moves as he swallows, watches the fine details of muscles in Daniel's face, where tension asserts itself consciously around his jaw, unconsciously at his brow.
A fledgling's hunger, maybe, just as Daniel warned him about. Louis, a hundred years on, with the careful rituals they'd created together, still exercising enormous willpower to detach himself.
Except he can feel it as well. Not as well, he's sure, if it were his fangs in Daniel's flesh, but feels it like a physical thing, a thread that winds straight from his centre of his being, down his arm, past Daniel's fangs. Not from his heart, no, something less rudimentary than a single, mindless muscle—his nervous system, perhaps, endrocine, the strange chemical makeup of his being, signals and electricity now flooding into his fledgling's body.
Feels a swoop of lightheadedness. Whoops.
He places his other hand against Daniel's face, a thumb that strokes alongside the corner of his mouth. "Enough," he says. "Daniel. Listen to me, let go."
More force can be applied, but for now, a coaxing.
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Daniel, in a voice that should be saying Mr Molloy. A light touch.
It's like—
Then, but then was fine, too, in its way.
He doesn't have Louis' experience or Catholic vegetarian willpower. He does have an addict's history, and an ingrained, if old, fail-safe protocol to just fucking listen if someone tells him he looks like he's about to OD. That's the emergency button he hits for this, even though the process of withdrawing certainly takes longer than he thinks it does. Armand can see him start when it does, though, his touch getting firmer as though steadying himself, eventually shaking through him to lifting his head away from the elder's wrist. Blinking, swaying.
Blood on his mouth, eyes bright. Whatever color they are, it's currently a perfect mirror to Armand's.
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His other hand is busy, though, still resting warm against Daniel's cheek as Armand tips his head, studies his face, looks into eyes that have gone a golden-red, more earth than fire, like Baltic amber, still bright. A stroke of his thumb glides along blood-slick lips, feels the remnants of fang at the edge. Pushes just enough to test its sharpness, as if he wasn't just well acquainted.
Relents, hand gentling, still with a spread of contact, fingertips to jaw. Feels a storm of urges. He has already given into enough of them for one night.
"Better?"
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"Sure," he says, like better is both obvious and assumed, and like he has far more important priorities to think about. Because he does. Addict-brain in full swing, caring for little beyond paying overly close attention to the hyperfixation potential in front of him, and following the very very good feelings he's experiencing.
Armand looks like a very decorated cosmic body. A black hole, but not the dismissive, crushing, thing he once accused Daniel of being, but something that centers reality into it. Christmas lights around something velvet-dark.
"Do you want any?"
Manners. Sure, he can down everything hidden in a backgammon box. But it's polite, and that's why you get high with other people. Sharing the experience.
"I know you don't need to, but do you want to?"
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Standing stable and all, but like a readjustment has to happen inside of himself. A glitching kind of moment in which Armand reflexively attempts to divine what the correct answer is, his own competing desires and sense of control all disorganised within him. Blood dries in a wandering path down his arm, collected as a smear at the elbow.
"Yes," he says. Because he does.
And he would like for it to all be pared down just as simply as Daniel makes it seem. Feels in his own mouth the slight ache that comes with fangs growing sharp, that comes with wanting to bite down.
The hand lingering at Daniel's face turns outward. A tip of his head follows a gaze scraped down to where he knows fat veins lie down the side of a warm throat.
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But that's out the window, because he feels incredible, and hesitation has been stripped away and the most annoying facet of his personality, the fearless hedonist part, just thinks: well of course he should offer, it doesn't matter how fucking dangerous Armand is or how this might twist things up between them, it would simply be crazy to withhold.
Armand's hand on his face, fingers practically in his fucking mouth. He tastes his blood still. He could take more, he could take it forever.
He tilts his head back in a plain offer. His own hand is still at his maker's side.
"Come on."
Been in Daniel's apartment before, been in Daniel's throat before. This time he's asking for it. Come on.
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They widen a little here, drinking in the sight. The invisible thrum of pulse beneath offered skin. Come on jerks in him like a hook caught in his belly, will have to consider later whether it's because it has the vaguest hint of an order or simply because of the recklessness of the words themselves. Feels like a tiger being teased.
Imagines, for a split second, leaping, tearing.
Does what feels like the equivalent, and steps into Daniel's space. Catches his hand in his hair, another to keep his chin so positioned and turned a little aside. Delicately applies his fangs on skin, a dainty twinned piercing sensation followed by the more intimate press of a warm mouth to throat.
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A bite, pain that isn't really pain at all, and Daniel makes some small, gasped sound, hardly aware of it. One hand on Armand's side, the other pressed to his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt.
He had wound his arms around him, too, in San Fransisco. Sympathy for the devil, or a flicker of action before death. Here, Armand can feel him, see himself as Daniel sees him, and it isn't quite that he's beautiful— he's a centerpiece of reality, maybe Daniel sees too much of him, but he isn't afraid, not even of the parts that cut into his hands when he picks it up to look at, and he isn't repulsed, even when he's so fucking pissed off.
It feels good to be fed on. Did he believe it? Not quite this much. Jesus fucking christ.
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He also knows that he doesn't appear that way to any of them. All of them in love with narrative meaning. Armand had given Louis that narrative. Louis, determined to rewrite it. Daniel, pen in hand.
All this to say: he might agree with the potential for his own conniving narrative coherence on account of this experience being so very good that it seems impossible for him to not have taken it on purpose. That it should just fall into his hands.
His hands hold Daniel fixed in place as he drinks, long, languid, vampiric swallows, eyes closed. If his own blood is addictive for its age and lineage, then maybe the closest he can come to experiencing it is in his fledgling. But it isn't that, not really. It is what it was already when Daniel was human, the breadth of his perception. He had thought, fifty years ago, of the dense crushing weight of gravity, of his story being swallowed down, unmade and unspooled. It might have been.
It might even feel nice. Drinks, thinks of tape tangled around fingers, pulling him in. Thinks of the single droplet of blood, Daniel unconscious and Louis behind a door, that he'd collected out of a pool, tasted, as he listened. Of the half sip he'd managed before he'd been made to stop. Of the gluttonous draining, finally, well earned, on the floor in Dubai. Armand had put his arms around Daniel as he'd died. The urge is there again.
The grip of his jaw gentles. His fingers gentle. Responsible, neat, he presses his mouth against puncture wounds to collect the last of what oozes from them as they close.
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Armand could have just dropped him off a ledge and then loomed over him until he asked for help. Armand could have just thrown Claudia out the front door of the theater one morning. Daniel isn't sure that Armand knows why he does things. Daniel wants to sit here with the fucking sledgehammer.
Things to think about later, when he's not cranked out of his mind.
Almost a protest, when Armand pulls away. Surely it's there in the spam of his hand, but he's not pushy about it. Hey man, finish the fucking line, and he's not suicidal, hey, why don't you actually just drain me, wouldn't that be fun.
Stands there. Looks at him.
What are they doing?
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well, they're fucking around. Irresponsible. Armand has less excuse, but maybe also every excuse. No rules, no laws, no commands.
Blood trapped in the creases of his lips, and a messier smear of it on Daniel's mouth. This, Armand studies, before he makes the mistake of flicking that focus up, meeting Daniel's stare, the question it holds. Armand steps aside, around, letting him go on the same motion as he moves for his coat, loose shirt sleeve flapping open at the wrist.
It's not a question he has an answer for.
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Want to watch a movie?
Want to make out?
Yeah, great, that'll work.
His hand is on his maker's side until the last second, until Armand is too far away, even with Daniel's arm extended. Lingering atom by atom, off of his hand, his fingers, the little clawed tips at the ends that exist now because of Armand. Daniel lets him go, even though he could stay, in this questionable apartment with mismatched lamps and a tacky ceiling.
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