Work Text:
They meet in an overpriced hotel room in Chicago. A view of the water and a bar in the lobby that’s definitely watering down their liquor. Armand tells Louis he’s there to look at a potential new real estate venture, packs a sport coat he won’t wear and a box of business cards he won’t distribute. Daniel’s got no one left to lie to, but just for the hell of it he tells the flight attendant he’s going to a funeral. She doesn’t give him any sympathy.
This is what they do, as the century stumbles toward the finish line. Armand has it down to a science: wait for the nominees for a journalism prize to be announced, or the panelists at a conference. Call whatever paper he’s working for from a pay phone in Cairo or Greenwich Village, say are you allowed a plus-one . Wait for him to get through all the old excuses— you’re just coming so you can kill me and I quit you the same time I quit heroin and this isn’t some cruising spot in Paris, Armand, I can’t keep showing up to these things with you on my arm — until he burns himself out running in circles, finally admits that he’s already made reservations for two at a restaurant across from the convention center.
Two weeks later and Armand is rinsing the cum off in a hotel shower while Daniel checks for lingering streaks of blood in the mirror.
“I’m going gray,” he says, fingers parsing through the hair at his temples.
“Good,” Armand replies. “People take older writers more seriously.”
“They already take me seriously. This is your fault, you know.”
Down to a science . Turn off the water. Watch muddy white and bright red swirl in the drain. “How, exactly?”
“You could stop the whole process anytime you want. Unless it’s your goal to make me look like a cradle robber.”
Armand steps out of the shower, skin glistening in the yellow incandescent light. There’s a set of fingerprint bruises on his hips, matching with the teeth imprinted on Daniel’s shoulder, the band-aids on his arms to keep his suit safe from bloodstains. It’ll all be gone by the end of the night: Armand heals fast, and he’s careful with his toys.
“I think you’re growing into yourself, Daniel. Aging is as much of a gift as undeath. Maybe it is harder to see than it used to be, in your world of plastic and modern medicine, but—”
“Save it. If you’re looking for someone to age vicariously through, pick a different boy. The men in my family don’t grow old with any kind of grace.”
Daniel interrupts him often, without a second thought— like every conversation is a play he’s seen a dozen times before, a script he’s already memorized. Armand has killed humans for far lesser slights; he should have killed this one years ago, in that San Francisco townhouse. But Louis insisted. Louis transformed him from a body to a symbol, from a hapless boy to a bright young reporter . It was an exercise in restraint— saving a person to prove it was still something they could do.
It was an exercise in humanity, too. An exercise that Armand revisits every few months, face against the window, grinding back against something far more alive than he is, something he could overpower and destroy in less than a second. It’s a reminder of a promise he made to both of them, Louis and Daniel.
A promise neither of them remember him making. But he’ll keep it anyway.
“I don’t make new ones,” Armand says, wringing his hair out. “Try asking Louis again.”
“Yeah, that’ll go over well. ‘Sorry about the affair, Mr. du Lac, have you changed your mind about letting me into your club of psychic immortals yet?’”
“Well, I would perhaps phrase it differently.”
Daniel moves past him into the room, searching the carpet for his boxers. His shoulder brushes against Armand’s arm briefly, and god, the warmth of him, the skin and the blood underneath. His mouth fills with teeth; he digs his nails into his palms until it hurts. He made a promise. To his companion, to a half-dead young man. Maybe someday, when the young man is old. But not yet. He stays perfectly still until the fangs retract.
“There’s some kinda party tonight at the bar downstairs. The other nominees are going, I think.” Daniel’s voice has a strange undercurrent to it; a nervousness that hasn’t been present since their first nights together.
“Should we go?”
“It’s a couples’ thing.”
“I see.” All the hiding and double-entendre is new to Armand— for most of his life men were just paying customers and onlookers were just angry cattle. But Daniel has a job on the line, a reputation to uphold, a daughter and a tenuous custody arrangement. It all feels like a game, sneaking around like this. Armand has to admit playing it gives him a certain thrill, like flashing his fangs at a mortal child whose parents would never believe her. “There’s a bar on Rush Street, I think, we could—”
“Not exactly what I had in mind,” Daniel says. Still nervous. There’s something else, something fraying the edges of his thoughts. Armand can’t help but press up against his mind and feel the silken shape of it. Something new. Something in the suitcase. A fight between embarrassment and desire. He doesn’t need to look to know what the expression on Daniel’s face will be: he saw it a thousand times in Venice, in the eyes of all the men with something they would rather pay a stranger for than ask their wives to try.
Armand leans against the doorframe. He’s still naked, a fact that they’re both still very aware of— all his scars and skin and muscle on display. “Show me.”
“Yeah?”
“ Yeah ,” Armand replies, mocking.
He leans over his suitcase, digs through the blank cassettes and clean shirts and crumpled-up speech drafts until he finds what he’s looking for. It’s a flat box tied with string, a designer logo stamped on the front: not one Armand recognizes but no doubt impressive on a reporter’s salary. Daniel holds it out before him, suddenly repossessed by that mix of bravado and insatiable curiosity that led him to that townhouse in ‘seventy-three, that keeps leading him into war zones and Soviet offices and men behind trees in semi-public parks.
“I was thinking maybe I’d go with my girlfriend.”
Armand sucks in a breath, a familiar blend of excitement and fever rearing its head inside him. This isn’t new— nothing is, after nearly five centuries— but it’s certainly been a while. Louis doesn’t care what he looks like, what he is, just as long as he stays below him. On his knees in the endless confessional. Marius would dress him up sometimes: Helen of Troy, Cassandra, Mary Magdalene. When the painting was finished he’d push his skirts up and take him there in the studio.
Daniel tests the limits of their relationship infrequently, and always with an escape plan built in for both of them. This is new for Armand, who had never considered the existence of boundaries until he began to sense his companion’s apprehension towards crossing them. He’s never had to ask someone to hurt him before. But each time he does ask, there’s an immediate answer. And Daniel Molloy is a quick learner: say tell me what you want to do to me enough times, eventually he’ll start to listen.
“If you hate it, we can stay here,” Daniel says, shifting his weight between his feet.
“Oh, I don’t hate it.” Armand walks over and gives him a slow, soft kiss; he lifts the box from his grasp.
“I just wanna show you off.”
He’s heard that one before, from almost everyone who’s ever had him. There’s a brief feeling that passes through him, like an oil spill under the skin: heavy hands on his bare shoulders, Mediterranean salt baked into clothes chosen for him. It’s gone as soon as it arrives. “Of course you do,” he says. He unties the twine around the box and steps back toward the bathroom.
Armand locks the door, lets out a breath that he’s been holding for an indeterminate amount of time in lungs that don’t need air. Sets the box in front of him, balanced precariously across the sink. Takes a roll of medical tape leftover in the first aid kit (Daniel never goes to a conference without one. Down to a science.) and tucks his cock flat between his legs. Opens the box. Looks down at the contents and feels a smile creep over his face.
Whatever store clerk helped Daniel pick everything out, she had good taste. A couple necklaces laid out on top of the tissue paper, emerald stones on barely-there gold chain, with rings to match. The dress itself is full-length and nearly skintight; blue satin that will read black in the ambient lighting downstairs, studded all over with tiny starbursts of embroidery. He steps into it and slides it up past his hips. What did Daniel say, he wonders, when the cashier asked who he was buying it for? A girlfriend? A wife? Did he tell her the truth and listen to her laugh at the obvious joke of it?
“I had to guess your size,” comes a muffled voice from the bedroom.
“Lucky guess.” Armand pulls the straps over his shoulders. It fits like it was made for him.
Nothing to be done about the scars he can usually hide under his collar except hope that no one asks any questions. Maybe it’s naive to think he’ll make it through a room full of journalists without someone demanding answers from him; but Daniel will afford him some level of protection. Louis always does, at the post-sunset galas and investors’ events he’s forced to make appearances at.
This, too, feels routine: an old habit from his days at Marius’ side. Fumble with the clasps on the jewelry. Find a safety pin in the first aid kit to pull the fabric a little tighter around his flat chest. Pull a few strands of hair to the front of his face— he hates the feeling but it hides his hairline. Rummage through his things until he finds a tiny pot of kohl taken from a corpse in Madrid; smudge it along the lower lashline with his fingers. Another habit, picked up in Venice and mostly abandoned after the fire in Paris.
Look in the mirror.
It’s a kind of comfort to see someone unidentifiable in his reflection. Armand feels less like an occupant of his body and more like its keeper; he watches it closely, takes it by the hand and leads it around, tells it how to behave, but always from a distance. It’s a surprise when he looks in the mirror and sees himself.
The woman looking back at him now has a lot in common with Armand: the same face, the same fossilized eyes, the same ancient bite marks on the throat. But she’s not Armand, and this is somehow easier to reckon with. Better to recognize the person staring back at him from the private fantasies of Daniel Molloy than from his own life.
As he steps out of the bathroom into the fading Gold Coast light, he can tell Daniel recognizes her, too. His jaw falls nearly to the carpet and he leans forward in his armchair. “Damn.”
“How do I look?”
“Like Bollywood’s Audrey Hepburn. Like the most beautiful girl in the world. Come here.”
Armand crosses the room, drapes himself over Daniel’s lap, plants a kiss on the gray hairs above his ears. “Do you think it’s going to work?”
“Are you kidding? I’m more worried about the other guys trying to get you alone than I am about one of them calling me a fag.”
“You should get ready.”
Daniel cranes his neck to look out at the fading light. “We’ve got a couple minutes.”
“You want to make a good impression, don’t you, Mr. Molloy?” Armand leans back and starts to do up the buttons on his shirt.
“Whatever you say, Mrs. Molloy.”
“ Mrs. Molloy ? Ten minutes ago I was your girlfriend.”
He picks up Armand’s hand and kisses the knuckles. Ever the gentleman. “We moved fast. Shotgun wedding.”
“Isn’t your daughter blonde?”
“Okay, we’ll work on the details.”
The function is exactly what Armand expected: all burgundy and dark green leather, checkerboard floors and stained-glass overhead lighting. The people, too, are predictable. There’s the hotheaded political correspondent trying to hide an argument with his wife in the corner; the photographer buying an eager college student her third drink at the end of the bar. None of them worth keeping alive for longer than the time it would take to walk them to the alley, to drain them and then the line cook taking his smoke break by the dumpsters.
Heartbeats pound in his ears as they walk in— none louder than Daniel’s. His pulse has gotten steadily faster since the elevators. From terror or excitement Armand can’t tell, but regardless of what he’s feeling he’s got that unshakeable, overconfident look on his face, the one that gets him anywhere he wants to go.
“One drink. That sound good?” Daniel asks.
“One drink.”
“Then we can go to the place you were talking about, if you’d like. Or, you know.” His hand slides down the back of Armand’s dress, gropes at his ass. “We could just go back upstairs.”
“We’ll see where the night takes us.” Armand grabs his wrist and and moves it up a few inches, wrapping Daniel’s arm around his waist. Apparently he has the same attitude towards power and freedom that he has toward good cocaine: get high, stay high. Shout the words he sees in the clouds back down to the masses.
The photographer watches as they approach the bar, openly ignoring the girl he brought with him in favor of the hotshot reporter and the woman on his arm.
“ Daniel Molloy ,” he says, a black lung and a New Jersey accent. “We were all wondering if you’d show up.”
“To drinks?”
“To the whole fucking thing. Who is this?” The photographer’s eyes, watered-down vomit-green, flicker down the length of Armand’s body before he meets his eyes.
“My girlfriend—”
“Alice,” Armand cuts in, extending a handshake. The photographer takes it, holds it for a little too long.
“Right— Alice, Henry. Henry, Alice.” Daniel stumbles over the fake name as he makes the introduction. Only slightly. Not enough for a near-stranger to notice.
“You two are a beautiful couple.”
Daniel seems vindicated, despite the fact that Henry hasn’t looked at him yet.
“Where did you meet?”
“San Francisco,” Alice says, voice pitched a half-step up, wrapping both his arms around one of Daniel’s, leaning into his side. “He was looking for interview subjects in a bar.”
“And he found you.”
“Oh, I found him.”
Henry laughs. “And before that? That’s not a California accent I’m hearing.”
“I was born in Delhi, but I moved to Paris when I was quite young.”
“Ah, a little globetrotter.”
“Something like that.” It feels sacreligious to reduce nearly five hundred years of history into a sentence, but he’s baring enough of his skin to this room already. He leaves Italy out of it completely; the thought of the man in front of him knowing anything about his time there leaves an icy feeling in the bottom of his stomach.
“Well,” Daniel interjects, “I think we should order and make the rounds. Good to see you, Henry.”
“Sure. Hey, I loved that piece you did for the Atlantic back in April.”
He’s already steering himself and Alice towards the other end of the bar. “Thanks. I was a big fan of your stuff from the end of ‘nam.” Then, under his breath: “It’s the only relevant thing he’s done in the last ten years.”
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Armand asks.
“This is going great. I’m, like, bricked up right now.”
“Let’s sit down, then.”
They push the barstools as close together as possible. They each want the protection the other affords: Daniel’s reputation, Armand’s teeth and claws. They can’t bear to keep their hands off each other.
“Tell me, Mr. Molloy, is it the way I look or the way they’re falling for the show you’re staging?” He rests his chin on Daniel’s shoulder.
“I like knowing the truth.” He leans in. “I like being the only one here who knows it.”
“An unfortunate fetish for a journalist.”
“Shut up. Let me have this.”
Armand reaches up and kisses him. Neither of them check to see who’s watching first. “Anything you want,” he whispers as the bartender approaches.
And he means it. The next hour goes by in a blur of small talk and sips of his grasshopper, hanging off of Daniel’s arm and every word he says. He moves in a little closer every time he can feel someone’s eyes lingering on his back, every time a compliment hits a little too close to home. If Daniel notices, he doesn’t say anything— why would he? He has no frame of reference, no idea that, for his companion, this night is much more a reminder than an experiment. He doesn’t know about Rome, how Amadeo learned that the only way to avoid the advances of strangers was to never leave his master’s side. How quickly, how completely he began to love it: being beautiful and untouchable, perfect and on display. In the end he was always the subject of a bidding war, and the winner always got their prize. But he loved the moment just before the auction began. Tonight he can feel that moment stretching out endlessly in front of him, sparkling with emeralds and gold thread, guided through the room by Daniel’s unwitting excitement. What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.
And, mercifully, it can’t hurt Alice, either.
It’s easy to lie, to craft a portrait of her in offhand comments, stories from her college days. She tells a story from Armand’s time with the Theatre des Vampires, scrubbed clean of any trace of blood. She remembers the frescoes at a cathedral that a travel reporter published a piece on the other day— but not the year she last saw it, and certainly not the boy the artist used as a model for Simon the Zealot. There is so little of Armand that comes from his own memory, and so much that comes from the ways that everyone else has seen him; any lie becomes true the second he decides to make it so.
And then there’s Daniel. Grin split open in laughter, pale blue eyes under the dim lights, dark curls barely contained by post-shower hands and hair gel. A current of cold strategy underscoring every question asked and punchline delivered. He’s sizing up the competition, deciding which people are worth talking to again and which will fade to obscurity in the next few years.
He and Armand have this in common: the immediate search through the minds and motivations of everyone they meet, a cataloging of weaknesses. It was jarring to look into Daniel’s head for the first time and find a mirror instead of a table laid for dinner. No one had ever looked at him the way he looks at other people; at least, no one had ever looked at him and seen anything close to the truth.
Truth. Daniel Molloy’s international currency. One that, apparently, he likes to hoard. He tucks a strand of hair behind Alice’s ear for her, basking in the sentimental looks the gesture elicits from the middle-aged couple they’re talking to. She catches his hand as it pulls away, laces their fingers together.
Armand has been feilding thoughts from the other guests all night: are they really that happy, or is it a front and how did a guy like Daniel pull a woman like her and beautiful and beautiful and beautiful . The occasional flash of all the things the men in the room want to do to Alice, like stills in the back of a stolen Playboy . It’s jarring to see himself remade in their minds with the wrong parts and proportions, but not uncomfortable. Any change to a body trapped in stasis for five hundred years is welcome.
He glances over at Daniel and sees himself in the hotel elevator, one jewel-encrusted hand down the front of his slacks, the other holding his head in place as he chases the creme de menthe swimming in his bloodstream.
“We should go soon, darling, don’t you think?” Alice asks.
“That’s right. We’ve got dinner plans,” Daniel responds. Every muscle in his body is tensed; every ounce of self-restraint in him working overtime to keep him from pouncing on his girl right here, right now, in front of all these people.
Luckily, as the pair down the last of their drinks and say their goodbyes, he knows he won’t have to wait very long.
As soon as the elevator doors slide closed Armand sets about making Daniel’s fantasy a reality. In bare seconds he’s got him pushed against the back wall, tongue down his throat, hand snaking under the waistband of his boxers. He doesn’t feed from him— too unsure of how much blood he’s regained since their exploits earlier in the evening— but Daniel pulls away and tilts his head away, skull against the mirrored walls, neck exposed.
“Here’s the dinner bell, baby. I’m all yours.”
Armand lets out a breathless chuckle at the enthusiasm. He traces a slow, bruising line of kisses down his throat to his collarbones, ripping the first few buttons of his shirt open. He doesn’t bite down. It’s an exercise in restraint. It’s a promise he keeps like a secret.
Then he grips Daniel’s face, claws digging into the stubble along his jaw, and tilts it back to look at him. “ Mine ,” he says, drawn-out, voice dripping with possessive pride.
There aren’t a lot of things that Armand can call his own. He learned very early in his life not to hold onto anything that somebody could rip away from him someday. But here’s Daniel like a priest at the altar, a stray dog at the door, wrapped around his finger as tightly as the rings he probably maxxed out his credit card to buy; and how could he deny him the one thing he’s asking for?
“ Mine ,” he says again as Daniel’s hands find purchase on his thighs, the satin crushed against his skin.
Again in the hallway, just before he traps him in a kiss by the ice machine. Mine.
Again in their room, standing at the foot of their bed as Daniel takes his clothes off in a rushed lusting haze, more to himself than to his lover. Mine .
“How are we doing this?” Daniel pants.
“ We ?” Armand puts a hand on his hip in mock indignation. “This was your idea, Mr. Molloy. You can see it through by yourself.”
Daniel settles against the headboard and obediently spits into his hand. As he starts touching himself, practically drooling over the six feet of brown skin and lean muscle in front of him, Armand feels his own cock straining against the tape. He reaches behind him to unzip the dress, but Daniel shakes his head.
“Keep— ah — keep it on.”
Armand could never resist a direct order. He nods, folds his arms over his chest and watches as Daniel brings himself closer and closer and closer to the edge. It’s a sight to see: the desperation, the covetousness in his eyes. A nonbeliever face-to-face with an angel in the night. He would do anything in this state; he’d jump out the window and let himself fall dick-first onto the street below if Armand asked it in the right voice.
“This is becoming a pattern for you, Daniel,” he says. “You’re always more attracted to people when they’re pretending to be someone else. Isn’t that right?”
Daniel just nods. Head falling back, eyes rolling closed.
“No, no. Look at me. I’m doing this for you, remember. Tell me: did you dress your wife up in one of your suits before you fucked her? Did you ask her to use my name? Is that why she left you?”
His toes curl. His chest heaves. “ Fuck , Armand—”
“Wrong.”
“ Alice.”
“There you go.”
“Come closer.”
Armand walks over and perches on the edge of the bed, reaching out to stroke Daniel’s hair. “Anything you want,” he whispers. Now that he’s close, twin keyed-up pulses pounding in his ears, there’s a hunger that rears its ugly head inside of him. He’s been more animal than human for half a millennium; a slave to killer instincts. He picks up Daniel’s free hand, nonchalant, and pulls the bandage off his wrist.
Not a broken promise— just a renegotiation of the terms.
Daniel comes the second Armand’s teeth sink into his skin, right over the same marks he left hours before, spilling across his own stomach as a string of incoherent curses fall uninvited from his lips.
Then it’s quiet. Nothing but ragged breathing and the ticking of the alarm clock, and Armand’s throat working as he swallows mouthful after mouthful of blood. Daniel has to grab him by the hair and pull him off, pale and sweating.
“Apologies,” Armand says.
“‘S okay. Uh, it’s great, actually. I mean it.”
They sit there for a moment, close but not touching. If they close their eyes they can almost see the walls of a master bedroom in Modesto rise up around them. A kitchen and a landline and a bronze coin from the local Narcotics Anonymous chapter; parent-teacher conferences marked in spidery ballpoint on the calendar. Reading separate books in bed every night until Daniel falls asleep first, every time, without fail.
The idea has passed as soon as it’s arrived. Neither of them have ever had a good thing they didn’t try to destroy; never had a home they didn’t try to burn down. Daniel has a pathological need to be anyone but the man he was raised to be, and Armand would make a good wife— a great one, even— but he’d be a terrible excuse for a human.
They each breathe a private sigh of relief when Daniel gets up to stumble to the bathroom without saying anything. Better for both of them if they sweep it under the rug, leave it for the maids to clean up after check-out.
“We should mess up the sheets in the other bed before we leave,” Daniel says. They’re under the covers now, mostly naked, flipping through TV channels and sharing a cigarette that they ash into a mug stolen from the coffee machine in the corner. “When we checked in I said we were just sharing a room to cut costs.”
“Whatever you say,” Armand replies. The dress lies discarded on the carpet next to him. It looks like nothing, crumpled up in the flickering light of the TV. A game show. A late-night interview. A sitcom dubbed over in Spanish. None of it interesting enough to hold their attentions.
Two days later they say goodbye at the airport. Daniel heads toward domestics, goes back to his bachelor pad in Orange County. He puts the new trophy on the top shelf of his bookcase; the dress in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Then he’s got an interview early the next morning, and the weekend takes up less and less space in his head until it’s just fragments, Polaroids he flips through while the water’s going cold in the shower or he wakes up hard in the early hours of the morning.
Armand walks toward internationals, sits at the gate and thinks about how to break the news to Louis that the building they were going to buy had too many code violations to be worth it. He tells himself that it’s good he got it out of his system; an infected wound that needs to be drained every few months so it doesn’t go septic. But he spends the whole trip across the Atlantic running his fingers over the emerald around his throat.