Two thoughts, one after the other. A maker's instinct, maybe, preventing him from turning this request aside. The second thought is
not worth entertaining, too far in the past to reach, nearly half a millennia. He looks down at Daniel's hand, re-establishing a point of connection. Studies that hand, far from work rough, but not delicate without being indelicate. Remembers watching his hands in Dubai, ably dancing over laptop keys, or one gripping the other as it began to shake.
Armand will stay, of course. Daniel is still on the floor. Hackles lowering.
"You should rest," he says, and then, "I'll stay."
It occurs to Daniel, laying on the floor with one hand hooked against Armand's knee, that Armand is the only being in this world who cannot see into his head and whose head Daniel cannot see into, the only one that he can't be tempted to spy on, that he doesn't have to worry about slipping up around. It can be quiet, with Armand. And he can rest.
A profound emotion for a long, silent moment.
Finally he moves. Things to take care of. Executive decisions to be made, like coaxing his maker by the hand, and offering him pajamas that will be just too big for him. Overstepping, but Armand had kissed him, had said a shattering thing, and so this is the call. In a private moment, changing into sleepwear and brushing his teeth, he tells Louis (who is not happy), but at least he can be honest in how fucking tired he is and how he really doesn't think he'll make it back in time.
There is a coffin in his bedroom, but the windows are sealed. His regular bed his fine.
"Just throw a blanket over my head if you bail," he says. "There's no direct light path from the hallway into here, but the ambient light will probably wake me up."
He finds himself following along a path that Daniel has summoned into being through his request. Not quite going through the motions, too engaged for that, but feeling, perhaps, a little out of body as he gets changed into tartan pyjama pants and a loose T-shirt, hears the sound of teeth brushing, finds himself considering the sleeping arrangements. There should be some kind of succinct word for desperately wanting a thing that is currently happening.
A word for the thing he is wanting, while we're at it. Sex, except they aren't actually having any? Companionship? Ill-fitting, from what Armand knows about companionship. It is more of a feeling, similar to the way it feels to bite down, and feeling the skin break, just as the blood comes up.
Onto the bed.
Considers these words, still sitting. Posture manages not to add to any haunted doll vibes, a sideways slouch with his palm bracing him. Says, "Do you remember when I said that turning you wasn't about him," is only technically a question, continuing with, "You said you believed me."
Slightly Victorian-feeling, in pajamas. His exposed ankles. If Daniel knew Armand was thinking about the s-word he might give him shit for unpopular kinks, or more likely, just turn red. Running out of steam to be combative, this evening. A lot's gone on, and the sun threatens the seam of the horizon.
Words, a word. Daniel would pick from: validation, intimacy, comfort.
Are they both the same kind of lonely, he wonders.
Pillows get re-arranged, and Daniel finds himself on his side, negotiating with bedsheets that are thankfully clean, but tucked in very tight as he's mostly used his bed as a desk/filing cabinet/storage space now that he mostly sleeps in a glorified shoebox most of the time. White sheets, except for one that's light green because the extra topsheet on the nice set vanished a year or so ago, and a navy blue duvet. Unremarkable things, as he listens to Armand say this thing.
"You didn't sound like you were lying."
Interesting how little they actually need telepathy, in some respects. In moments where he thinks they may have only said the things around all that. It's as good as. Memory is not distorted, here. They heard each other.
"Do you know why you made me?"
It's fine if he doesn't know, his tone suggests. A hell of thing happened. Armand doesn't have to rewrite history if he's feeling a way, tonight. Love or horror or just lashing out. It's behind them, that incident. What it made them is significant, and will define the rest of their existences, but that incident was just... something that went on.
The question is asked and Armand sinks into silence. Daniel does not need telepathic access to his brain to suppose, maybe, he's wandering back in time, remembering the smell of smoke in the air, the hard floor beneath his knees, his fangs in Daniel's neck. The actions come back clear, but what of the roiling mess of feeling that was occurring beneath them?
And no, he doesn't want to make something up. Revise it into a neat narrative. A stitch in a bigger tapestry, as if all of everything he has ever done led up to the moment he bled into Daniel's mouth. Lestat-coded behaviour.
He has also had a lot of time to think about this exact question. Obsess over it.
"It was impulsive," after a moment. "I was angry with you. But if I was angry with you, leaving you dead would have been enough. I drank from you and I knew that you were the only person who walked the earth that could have destroyed me in the specific way that you did. You came to know something about my capacity for," evil? He tips his head a little. "My capacity."
And he wanted to keep it. Preserve it. Return to it. A hundred years might have been true, if not for that.
Daniel lets these thoughts sit in the dark of the room around them, between them; he can see Armand (and everything) plainly, familiar bookshelves, bits of decoration he should have updated ages ago, the door the can find with his eyes closed. No one's ever shared this room with him. A few people have shared the bed, over the years, but only for moments. Armand does not sit on anyone's side, takes up no previously occupied space.
Yes, these things feel true. Impulse, anger, and something else. Preservation. Creation. One hundred years.
"We saw rare things in each other," he offers quietly.
All of their worst parts. There is a horrible comfort in it.
Armand, a silken touch brute forcing his way through all that Daniel's mind had to offer, brain bathed in a churning bath of chemicals, sleep deprivation, fear and pain. Daniel, methodical, who listened to the things he and Louis (but more importantly, he) did and did not say, who heard the accent he used when he spoke Arabic, and does not think he could possibly be boring if he tried.
Armand knew Daniel was a danger. He should have been able to trust his own psychic handiwork, and yet, he pinpointed the dying, mortal journalist's particular addictions. Louis sees Daniel as righteous, but Armand saw closer to the truth, Daniel thinks. He just fucking has to. And not only because Louis programmed him that way; it was there, when he was twenty, when he was sitting beaten and exhausted in front of Armand.
A black hole versus a monster.
Daniel makes a thoughtful sound. Reflecting. He fusses with some bedsheets, gets comfortable on his side, head propped up. Regards Armand.
"I've been afraid. Of you. You're frightening. It just..." he makes a gesture, searching for articulation. Demonstrating a feeling of pushing past it, perhaps, though that's not quite it, either. He ends up shrugging. "If I feel threatened, I just feel like I'm on the right path."
So. Armand was giving him positive reinforcement on two fronts, really.
"A useful compulsion." For the journalist, for the monster, either way. Armand shifts on his palms, sinking down to lay flat. He is as near Daniel as he ever was when he and Louis settled down to sleep, which is to say, still quite apart. He feels like the freewheeling atoms in the space between them are agitated, warm.
Louis was younger than Daniel when they met, but an older vampire. Still, nearly comparative, in the scheme of things. Armand liked to be near him, of course he did. When they did sleep in cuddlier arrangements, it was pleasant. Good.
That Armand has a desire akin to wrapping around Daniel like a fucking python feels different. Something that feels like a devouring and a protectiveness at the same time.
Quiet is his first response, and this either means he's trying to think of an answer, or that he already has one, and isn't sure if he should offer it in full. The space between them is like a physical thing, alight and radiating, like a floor panel in a video game that's going to explode if someone steps on it wrong.
Eventually,
"I don't know if I'm safe from you. But I think I'm safe with you."
And if he feels threatened, he knows he's on the right path, so what the fuck does that make them.
The intent look he has fixed on Daniel's face, unwavering throughout the thoughtful quiet, dips down and aside. Measuring the feeling of being pleased for this answer. He has some awareness he isn't as inscrutable as he wants to imagine, little tells in his face, a minor flex at his mouth.
Daniel said there were no stupid decisions here, or something like that. Perhaps the more accurate thing would be to say, there are only stupid decisions here.
"Will it bother you," he says, before Daniel can say something funny and mean about it, "that is, can you sleep with someone against you?"
This is, after all, about Daniel getting sleep after Armand has harmed him. He thinks that if Daniel would prefer he stand in a corner the whole time, he would do so. (Imagines Daniel would not actually prefer that.)
Daniel watches Armand's face. Burns things into his memory, too caught up in the moment to know how bad it will feel tomorrow to dissect this. The better the high the harder the crash, he know that. And yet here he is, chasing it, up and up.
Pause. Both versions of that question are completely insane. He doesn't know why it charms him, the fact that Armand doesn't just ask Will you hold me?, but it does. It makes something in his chest catch. Do you not know how to ask? he could say. What do you think will happen to you, if you phrase it like you want it?
Daniel shakes his head a little, slides an arm out.
"Come here."
For the record, it just means that they're giving stupidity a pass.
Something like anticipation prickles over him, a skin-deep sensation. Daniel, opening out his arm for him. (The sense memory of Daniel, catching at his leg, encouraging him to straddle.) The mattress shifts beneath moving weight, and Armand ducks in nearer, considering some half-measure before he does himself the favour of deciding against it.
Settles in against Daniel's side, and rests his head on his shoulder, his chest. An arm around him. A heart beat beneath his ear.
He had spent eighty years with a man that he knew, in some corner of his heart, would not let him breathe the same air as he if he knew the truth. Angling for a lost fledgling into affording him some comfort, even if that fledgling hates him and the other way around, can be one of his lesser sins. To be lived with, like all the rest.
The space between them does not explode. Does not trigger a game over screen, does not end the world. Daniel gathers Armand up into his arms, he pulls up the blankets, and he gets comfortable. Some fussing, it's been a while and they aren't used to each other this way, but as far as first times go it's easy.
Worryingly easy. Daniel tells himself this is a fast way to get his head fucked even without letting anyone alter his memories; regular humans gaslight and manipulate each other all the time. But then he thinks about how he wants the answer to a million questions, he thinks of Armand leaning in to kiss him, and he sees the thing inside of him that says yes, good, this is where you are safe, this is the correct den of terrible monsters to which you belong.
No rogue vampires are going to throw home made grenades at him. No Talamasca agents are going to show up. Nothing on this fucking planet is scarier than Armand, and everything knows it.
Daniel is tired, and this is comfortable, and some weak part of him could collapse with relief that anyone would choose to do this with him again, after all this time, after all the relationships he's ruined and bridges he's purposefully burned. He holds Armand like they're lovers, flexes one hand as though checking to make sure it still isn't tremoring, and closes his eyes.
And also finds a state of relaxation. A means of severing some wire that connects brain and body, without actually becoming numb to it. Feels as though he can take a stroll through the complex, labyrinthine interior of his physical form, from the tips of his fingers to the way he has settled his spine to lay against Daniel, to the slight pinch of his ear where it pressed between his own skull and the other vampire's chest.
Vampires, perfectly still when the rising sun casts its spell. Armand doesn't let it, not for himself. He listens to the steady and full heartbeat in Daniel's chest, the draw of breathing. He would sometimes access Louis' dreams in a light sort of way, but only out of boredom—dreams are nothing special, the kaleidoscope tossing about of dirty laundry, a garbage disposal grinding memory into unrecognisable paste. Mostly, he checked it for anything that shouldn't be there.
No such ability here. Just Daniel's arms around him, still holding an odd kind of unconscious tension as if to keep Armand close. Safe not from him, but with him. Armand twists this thought around and around in his mind, like the keychain between his fingers. It makes him want to stay.
Does not. Daniel doesn't expect him to, and he finds himself meeting expectation. Quietly, slowly removing himself some hours later. Stands in his pyjamas for some more minutes, before he changes. Folds the borrowed clothing, sets it on the bed. Tries to decide if Daniel had meant it about the blanket thing, like making sure a parakeet stays docile.
Fine. He readjusts the blanket, drawing it properly over Daniel, a strange and morbid sort of tucking in. Looks at the shape this makes in the bed, and thinks: he, Armand, is a fool. Maybe Daniel will think so as well, when he rouses beneath his blankets as the night comes creeping.
(Daniel's sleep is deep, and untroubled. When the vampire he's cradling disentangles himself to slip away, he doesn't stir; too tired, too sedated by the sun, and the previous night's lack of sleep, all the stress, the stupid jolt to his heart, and his maker's healing blood. He won't come to until sunset.
Still. He doesn't move like a human would, shifting around, but the change in position is significant. One arm moves just a little, reaching over the now empty space. Grasping for a body no longer there.)
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not worth entertaining, too far in the past to reach, nearly half a millennia. He looks down at Daniel's hand, re-establishing a point of connection. Studies that hand, far from work rough, but not delicate without being indelicate. Remembers watching his hands in Dubai, ably dancing over laptop keys, or one gripping the other as it began to shake.
Armand will stay, of course. Daniel is still on the floor. Hackles lowering.
"You should rest," he says, and then, "I'll stay."
no subject
It occurs to Daniel, laying on the floor with one hand hooked against Armand's knee, that Armand is the only being in this world who cannot see into his head and whose head Daniel cannot see into, the only one that he can't be tempted to spy on, that he doesn't have to worry about slipping up around. It can be quiet, with Armand. And he can rest.
A profound emotion for a long, silent moment.
Finally he moves. Things to take care of. Executive decisions to be made, like coaxing his maker by the hand, and offering him pajamas that will be just too big for him. Overstepping, but Armand had kissed him, had said a shattering thing, and so this is the call. In a private moment, changing into sleepwear and brushing his teeth, he tells Louis (who is not happy), but at least he can be honest in how fucking tired he is and how he really doesn't think he'll make it back in time.
There is a coffin in his bedroom, but the windows are sealed. His regular bed his fine.
"Just throw a blanket over my head if you bail," he says. "There's no direct light path from the hallway into here, but the ambient light will probably wake me up."
no subject
A word for the thing he is wanting, while we're at it. Sex, except they aren't actually having any? Companionship? Ill-fitting, from what Armand knows about companionship. It is more of a feeling, similar to the way it feels to bite down, and feeling the skin break, just as the blood comes up.
Onto the bed.
Considers these words, still sitting. Posture manages not to add to any haunted doll vibes, a sideways slouch with his palm bracing him. Says, "Do you remember when I said that turning you wasn't about him," is only technically a question, continuing with, "You said you believed me."
no subject
Words, a word. Daniel would pick from: validation, intimacy, comfort.
Are they both the same kind of lonely, he wonders.
Pillows get re-arranged, and Daniel finds himself on his side, negotiating with bedsheets that are thankfully clean, but tucked in very tight as he's mostly used his bed as a desk/filing cabinet/storage space now that he mostly sleeps in a glorified shoebox most of the time. White sheets, except for one that's light green because the extra topsheet on the nice set vanished a year or so ago, and a navy blue duvet. Unremarkable things, as he listens to Armand say this thing.
"You didn't sound like you were lying."
Interesting how little they actually need telepathy, in some respects. In moments where he thinks they may have only said the things around all that. It's as good as. Memory is not distorted, here. They heard each other.
"Do you know why you made me?"
It's fine if he doesn't know, his tone suggests. A hell of thing happened. Armand doesn't have to rewrite history if he's feeling a way, tonight. Love or horror or just lashing out. It's behind them, that incident. What it made them is significant, and will define the rest of their existences, but that incident was just... something that went on.
no subject
The question is asked and Armand sinks into silence. Daniel does not need telepathic access to his brain to suppose, maybe, he's wandering back in time, remembering the smell of smoke in the air, the hard floor beneath his knees, his fangs in Daniel's neck. The actions come back clear, but what of the roiling mess of feeling that was occurring beneath them?
And no, he doesn't want to make something up. Revise it into a neat narrative. A stitch in a bigger tapestry, as if all of everything he has ever done led up to the moment he bled into Daniel's mouth. Lestat-coded behaviour.
He has also had a lot of time to think about this exact question. Obsess over it.
"It was impulsive," after a moment. "I was angry with you. But if I was angry with you, leaving you dead would have been enough. I drank from you and I knew that you were the only person who walked the earth that could have destroyed me in the specific way that you did. You came to know something about my capacity for," evil? He tips his head a little. "My capacity."
And he wanted to keep it. Preserve it. Return to it. A hundred years might have been true, if not for that.
no subject
What a fucking trip, tonight has been.
Daniel lets these thoughts sit in the dark of the room around them, between them; he can see Armand (and everything) plainly, familiar bookshelves, bits of decoration he should have updated ages ago, the door the can find with his eyes closed. No one's ever shared this room with him. A few people have shared the bed, over the years, but only for moments. Armand does not sit on anyone's side, takes up no previously occupied space.
Yes, these things feel true. Impulse, anger, and something else. Preservation. Creation. One hundred years.
"We saw rare things in each other," he offers quietly.
All of their worst parts. There is a horrible comfort in it.
no subject
Armand, a silken touch brute forcing his way through all that Daniel's mind had to offer, brain bathed in a churning bath of chemicals, sleep deprivation, fear and pain. Daniel, methodical, who listened to the things he and Louis (but more importantly, he) did and did not say, who heard the accent he used when he spoke Arabic, and does not think he could possibly be boring if he tried.
Uneven, true. But—
"And you didn't scare."
Not really. Not like that.
no subject
A black hole versus a monster.
Daniel makes a thoughtful sound. Reflecting. He fusses with some bedsheets, gets comfortable on his side, head propped up. Regards Armand.
"I've been afraid. Of you. You're frightening. It just..." he makes a gesture, searching for articulation. Demonstrating a feeling of pushing past it, perhaps, though that's not quite it, either. He ends up shrugging. "If I feel threatened, I just feel like I'm on the right path."
So. Armand was giving him positive reinforcement on two fronts, really.
no subject
"A useful compulsion." For the journalist, for the monster, either way. Armand shifts on his palms, sinking down to lay flat. He is as near Daniel as he ever was when he and Louis settled down to sleep, which is to say, still quite apart. He feels like the freewheeling atoms in the space between them are agitated, warm.
Louis was younger than Daniel when they met, but an older vampire. Still, nearly comparative, in the scheme of things. Armand liked to be near him, of course he did. When they did sleep in cuddlier arrangements, it was pleasant. Good.
That Armand has a desire akin to wrapping around Daniel like a fucking python feels different. Something that feels like a devouring and a protectiveness at the same time.
"And now?"
no subject
Quiet is his first response, and this either means he's trying to think of an answer, or that he already has one, and isn't sure if he should offer it in full. The space between them is like a physical thing, alight and radiating, like a floor panel in a video game that's going to explode if someone steps on it wrong.
Eventually,
"I don't know if I'm safe from you. But I think I'm safe with you."
And if he feels threatened, he knows he's on the right path, so what the fuck does that make them.
no subject
Daniel said there were no stupid decisions here, or something like that. Perhaps the more accurate thing would be to say, there are only stupid decisions here.
"Will it bother you," he says, before Daniel can say something funny and mean about it, "that is, can you sleep with someone against you?"
This is, after all, about Daniel getting sleep after Armand has harmed him. He thinks that if Daniel would prefer he stand in a corner the whole time, he would do so. (Imagines Daniel would not actually prefer that.)
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Pause. Both versions of that question are completely insane. He doesn't know why it charms him, the fact that Armand doesn't just ask Will you hold me?, but it does. It makes something in his chest catch. Do you not know how to ask? he could say. What do you think will happen to you, if you phrase it like you want it?
Daniel shakes his head a little, slides an arm out.
"Come here."
For the record, it just means that they're giving stupidity a pass.
no subject
Settles in against Daniel's side, and rests his head on his shoulder, his chest. An arm around him. A heart beat beneath his ear.
He had spent eighty years with a man that he knew, in some corner of his heart, would not let him breathe the same air as he if he knew the truth. Angling for a lost fledgling into affording him some comfort, even if that fledgling hates him and the other way around, can be one of his lesser sins. To be lived with, like all the rest.
no subject
Worryingly easy. Daniel tells himself this is a fast way to get his head fucked even without letting anyone alter his memories; regular humans gaslight and manipulate each other all the time. But then he thinks about how he wants the answer to a million questions, he thinks of Armand leaning in to kiss him, and he sees the thing inside of him that says yes, good, this is where you are safe, this is the correct den of terrible monsters to which you belong.
No rogue vampires are going to throw home made grenades at him. No Talamasca agents are going to show up. Nothing on this fucking planet is scarier than Armand, and everything knows it.
Daniel is tired, and this is comfortable, and some weak part of him could collapse with relief that anyone would choose to do this with him again, after all this time, after all the relationships he's ruined and bridges he's purposefully burned. He holds Armand like they're lovers, flexes one hand as though checking to make sure it still isn't tremoring, and closes his eyes.
no subject
And also finds a state of relaxation. A means of severing some wire that connects brain and body, without actually becoming numb to it. Feels as though he can take a stroll through the complex, labyrinthine interior of his physical form, from the tips of his fingers to the way he has settled his spine to lay against Daniel, to the slight pinch of his ear where it pressed between his own skull and the other vampire's chest.
Vampires, perfectly still when the rising sun casts its spell. Armand doesn't let it, not for himself. He listens to the steady and full heartbeat in Daniel's chest, the draw of breathing. He would sometimes access Louis' dreams in a light sort of way, but only out of boredom—dreams are nothing special, the kaleidoscope tossing about of dirty laundry, a garbage disposal grinding memory into unrecognisable paste. Mostly, he checked it for anything that shouldn't be there.
No such ability here. Just Daniel's arms around him, still holding an odd kind of unconscious tension as if to keep Armand close. Safe not from him, but with him. Armand twists this thought around and around in his mind, like the keychain between his fingers. It makes him want to stay.
Does not. Daniel doesn't expect him to, and he finds himself meeting expectation. Quietly, slowly removing himself some hours later. Stands in his pyjamas for some more minutes, before he changes. Folds the borrowed clothing, sets it on the bed. Tries to decide if Daniel had meant it about the blanket thing, like making sure a parakeet stays docile.
Fine. He readjusts the blanket, drawing it properly over Daniel, a strange and morbid sort of tucking in. Looks at the shape this makes in the bed, and thinks: he, Armand, is a fool. Maybe Daniel will think so as well, when he rouses beneath his blankets as the night comes creeping.
no subject
Still. He doesn't move like a human would, shifting around, but the change in position is significant. One arm moves just a little, reaching over the now empty space. Grasping for a body no longer there.)