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“An interesting game.” The voice is low, level, but Daniel’s newly sharp ears can hear it even over the sound of his ball colliding with the pins and sending them tumbling—Daniel’s twelfth strike in a row, another 300. “But hardly a challenge.”
His spine has gone rigid, but he contains himself, keeps his shoulders down, pastes a grin on his face when he turns. “The challenge is not sending the ball rocketing through the far wall,” he says.
His maker stares back at him without blinking.
Daniel swallows. “All about control,” he continues, plucking up his returned ball—a hefty 16-pounder, light as a feather—with clawed fingers. “Isn’t that what you always wanted to see from me? Boss?”
The title—once uttered with adoration, awe, desperate obedience—hits the air on a dagger of spittle. His fangs have dropped, and that’s not very controlled, is it, Daniel? But he doesn’t give a damn. He wants Armand to see them. What he’s made of him.
Armand moistens his lips but otherwise doesn’t move from where he’s planted himself at the end of the lane, hands folded neatly behind his back, slim and subdued and above it all. The biggest lie of all. Because, see, Daniel knows him now: remembers what a ghastly little monster he is. He might have fooled Louis, but he’ll never again fool him.
“I wanted to see you live,” Armand says, prim—like he’s back in his fucking loyal servant cosplay, and what the fuck was that even about? The multiple memory wipes weren’t enough; he had to fuck with Daniel’s head in other ways too? “A full life,” Armand continues, like Daniel gives a shit. “And I did. You did.”
“Until I blew up your spot and you decided to pull the plug?”
He almost gets him there: Armand opens his mouth to protest, but Daniel’s too angry, off his game; he ploughs through the silence that any good journalist knows how to leave. “I don’t know whether you were planning to torture me or seduce me; I could see my being immortal being handy for both. Sucks that the vampirism brought down the walls of Jericho, hmm?”
He taps his skull with the hand not holding the bowling ball. He hadn’t even realized that he’d started absently tossing the 16-pound ball in his hand like a baseball. Little flicks of his wrist and it rises and smacks back satisfying against his palm, rises and smacks, rises and smacks.
“I saw your face, after,” he spits. “You thought I’d never know! You thought I’d be, what? Your fucktoy, your punching bag, your little minion in death as well as life? Well, sucks to suck, doesn’t it, Armand?”
Armand’s irises vibrate a little at that, and fuck, it’s so good to see him show weakness—and from the silliest schoolyard shit, too. Daniel can still rile him up. Daniel does have control over the situation, for once in his fucked-up drugged-up memory-holed life.
“You saw that I knew, so you ran. Couldn’t face me on level ground, couldn’t stand the thought of the puppet without his strings—could you, you fucking coward?”
And without really deciding to do it, he hurls the bowling ball at Armand’s face.
Armand doesn’t flinch; he raises a hand, and the ball smacks against his open palm, cracking a bit where the sharp points of his fingertips meet its shell. Okay, fuck. That’s kind of hot. As is the way Armand closes his other fist, sending all the humans in the bowling alley—the spattering of Dude-lookalikes and bored teenage employees hanging around a dismal place like this at 10:30 at night on a Tuesday—crashing to the floor like scattered pins.
At least three cellphones obviously set to record also clatter to the carpet, so, yeah, okay, fair play. Not that the internet, as a collective, would believe Daniel Molloy was actually a vampire, even if he livestreamed himself fucking draining a guy. Daniel either inadvertently or through extreme intelligence figured out the very best way for a modern vampire to protect himself: tell the world he’s a vampire.
Daniel does his best to look unimpressed, even when Armand casually tosses the bowling ball away and it rolls neatly down the nearest lane, pulling ten pins in its wake. “What?” Daniel snips. “From what I remember, you liked an audience.”
Armand’s eyes gleam. “Foolish fledgling—” he begins, and Daniel braces himself—not without some eagerness—for the storm.
But instead Armand deflates with a suddenness and severity that takes Daniel aback far more than a show of strength and implausible vampire powers ever could. Armand’s always had a trick for making himself look small—poor little innocent urchin; won’t the big brave strong vampire protect?—but now, sinking onto the molded plastic bench at the Bowl-A-Rama, he genuinely does seem shrunken. His head folds down into his hands.
“I didn’t want this,” he mutters.
Daniel’s taken an involuntary step forward; he makes himself stop. “Yeah, yeah, I know: the idea repulses you, repulsed you. Well, whoops. Should have thought of that before you popped out a baby on the penthouse floor.”
Armand doesn’t reply, and this time Daniel, fists clenched, forces himself to outwait the silence.
“You’re right,” Armand says finally.
Fuck all the Pulitzers, fuck all those perfect games: the Bowl-A-Rama should be engraving Daniel’s name on a bowling ball for this. Somehow he resists pumping his fist in the air.
“I am a coward,” Armand says, to the sticky floor.
It feels like less of a triumph than Daniel imagined.
“I knew you would come to hate me, eventually,” Armand continues, in a flat voice. “Foolishly, I’d hoped it wouldn’t be—” He glances up, eyes rimmed with red. “—in the very first seconds of your new existence.”
Daniel does what he’s been wanting to do all evening: picks up a bowling ball and hurls it through the wall 65 feet away. Armand’s head rises like a startled deer at the sound of splintering wood.
“I don’t hate you, you idiot,” Daniel shouts, because fuck control. Fuck restraint. Fuck the rules. “I’m fucking pissed at you! You gave up on me! In 1985! And then you did it again! You fucking turned me and then immediately did it again! I’d say, what the hell is wrong with you, but if we started in on that, we’d be here past dawn.”
Armand’s lip quivers: maybe it’s genuine, maybe it’s manipulation, maybe it’s Maybelline—whatever, Daniel’s sick of it. “I had no reason to—”
“—What, to trust me?” Daniel cuts him off. “To stay and explain yourself? Talk about it? Treat me like an equal for two fucking seconds—”
The line between movement and thought has become blurred; he’s grabbing Armand by the elbows and pulling him to his feet without a lot of conscious consideration, and Armand—who only likes being manhandled under a tightly defined set of parameters (namely: he’s the one in control)—grabs him back, sharp nails stabbing through the leather of Daniel’s coat.
“You can’t be—”
Serious. My equal. My boy. Whatever he’s going to say, Daniel doesn’t want to hear it. So he shuts Armand up.
The kiss is mean, the tongue bite maybe-accidentally-on-purpose. His maker’s blood floods his mouth and it’s still the best drug Daniel’s ever had. He growls, or he moans, or he growl-moans, and Armand makes a noise back, nakedly animal. There, finally: the horrible divine creature of all Daniel’s dreams and nightmares.
The plastic bench cracks beneath them, and they roll onto the floor. When Daniel had indulged in imagining his reunion with his maker—and specifically his re-union (ahem) with his maker—he hadn’t pictured it taking place next to the ball return at the Bowl-A-Rama, but they’ve fucked in stupider places.
“Not exactly the Villa of the Mysteries, is it, boss?” Daniel snarks, shredding Armand’s shirt.
It's oddly satisfying watching his beautiful maker pant and moan and throw his head back in ecstasy against multicolor carpeting likely laid circa 1994. “This is what happens when I let you choose,” Armand says, breathless despite being a 500-year-old ultrapowerful vampire.
He’s going to give Daniel an ego.
“Better get used to it, babe,” Daniel says, hitching Armand’s hips into his lap. As furious as he was at his surprise vamping, he can’t say he doesn’t enjoy kneeling on ache-free joints. Or peeling the pants off a wriggling vampire so he can rest naked on Daniel’s clothed thighs, long dark legs bowing open to reveal the fluttering treasure of his hole. Daniel probes at it with the back of a thumbnail—just a glancing brush, really, but Armand shudders. “You still like it rough, baby?”
Armand whimpers. He’s looking up at Daniel with big ochre eyes, begging to be taken, to be—punished.
Oh, fuck.
“No,” Daniel snaps, pulling his hand away. “You don’t get off that easily.” Index finger to his teeth, he rips off and spits out the nail. “In either sense.”
“Daniel.” Maybe Armand had been aiming for a desperate whine, but it comes out a command.
Daniel ignores it, sucking on his finger until it’s good and wet, sloppy with spit, enjoying the performance. Enjoying the way Armand—only Armand—can glare while naked and bent in half at the waist on a dirty floor. Little lord and master of all his surveys. The bossiest bottom.
Daniel feels an annoying pang of affection as he puts a finger inside Armand for the first time in forty years.
It’s just a finger, and he knows, from personal experience, that Armand can happily take a fist. So his maker hardly reacts, except to push down, like he’s ready for more. Well, tough. This is all he’s getting. Armand made Daniel wait—to become a vampire, then to talk to his fucking maker. So he can wait a while too.
He settles in, bending over Armand to kiss him, scrape his fangs along his chin, down the column of his throat, across his jugular. Not biting, not doing more than moving a single finger inside him, exploring almost absently that eager twitching channel he once knew so well.
“Daniel,” Armand says again, a little more insistently.
Daniel hums happily, like this is his usual method—hell, for all Armand knows, maybe it is now. That horny, desperate twenty-year-old who Armand liked to make come in his pants is long gone, after all. Maybe over the decades Daniel got really into that tantric sex stuff Sting does. How would Armand know? He chose not to know, not to be a part of it.
Daniel crooks his finger, just a tiny bit, and rubs his nose against Armand’s nipple.
“Daniel.” His tone is sharp now, high and a bit breathy. “Keep in mind that I’m, ahh…” At his stutter, Daniel holds back a grin. “Mentally…mentally holding every human in this building in a state of unconsciousness…”
“Mm, that sounds like a you problem,” Daniel says. He gives the nipple a little nip.
“Daniel.” Oh, there’s the whine. Even better than Daniel imagined. “Please—”
“Please what, maker?” He’s bent Armand neatly in half, thighs pinned against Daniel’s sides, even though he’s barely fucking him, just thrusting and twisting with the single inadequate digit. Lazy, but determined. Unrelenting.
Armand squirms, and wriggles, and clenches down on Daniel’s finger, but it’s not enough. He stares balefully at Daniel and Daniel stares back, studying his maker’s face: after all these years, unchanging in its terrible beauty.
Suddenly, Armand lets out a howl of frustration, claws raking great gashes in the carpet, biting into the concrete. “You remain singularly infuriating, be—” he pants, before cutting himself off in a way that’s also pretty infuriating if you ask Daniel.
“Yeah, so several ex-wives have told me,” he snipes back.
“Not before me,” Armand says, eyes glittering and possessive, and something turns over in Daniel’s traitorous heart.
He shouldn’t have expected better: the thing beats with Armand’s blood.
“You wanna be the first, huh?” he says, pulling out and then slamming three fingers back inside, two of them sharp. “My first, my last, my only, Armand—is that it?”
“Yes,” Armand hisses, grabbing a hank of Daniel’s hair and pulling him tighter. “You’re mine. My one and only fledgling.”
“And what do I get?” Daniel demands, driving deeper, worming his pinky inside. Armand’s breath catches, his bared throat quivering like he’s just held back a keen. “Tossed aside when you’re bored, or Louis forgets he hates you for five minutes, or you just decide you’re sick—”
He wrests Armand’s legs open wider. He’s so exposed, opened like a book in Daniel’s lap, his hole puffy and red where it's swallowing Daniel nearly to the wrist. Daniel wants to keep clawing upward until he can wrap a hand around his heart. He wants to disappear inside him.
“—You’re sick of me.” The words wrench out. “Some stupid junkie, addicted to you. What do I get then, Armand?”
Tears are tracking red down Armand’s cheeks. Down Daniel’s, too, he realizes—only when he sees the drops splatter onto Armand’s chest and belly. Neither of them are crying from pain, or not pain exactly—it’s something else, humming down whatever preternatural connection they share, that fallow tether that’s only just reawakened.
“Daniel. Beloved,” Armand says, gritting his teeth like he is in pain, like he’s suffered in silence for so long, and can’t bear it a moment longer. “You have all of me, forever, for as long as you’ll—”
Daniel shifts his thumb past the taut skin of Armand’s rim, plunging as deep as he can go, punching the air out of Armand’s lungs, and punching a cry out too: endless, almost soundless. Some echo of it blossoms with such suddenness in Daniel’s belly that it practically bowls him over—it’s so full-bodied, so complete, it doesn’t even really feel sexual. But it consumes him.
Eventually he comes back to himself, plastered against Armand’s chest, his slick, bloodied hand uncurled and cupped protectively under Armand’s ass, so as not to dishonor it with even a touch of bowling alley carpet.
It’s not until Armand lets out a satisfied sigh and urges Daniel up into the familiar coil of his arms that he realizes he’s once again come in his pants.