Chapter Text
Hands on his throat. Right on cue. Daniel’s eyes were closed tight and he didn't even bother clocking his attacker. None of this was about them, anyway. They were bait. No–he was the bait, gambling on an unfinished, confusing, jumbled group of data sets.
The hands around his neck gripped even tighter and Daniel winced.
Armand would let him get killed by the attacker… or he wouldn’t. Something about the binary stakes made this far easier to deal with, even as his heart thumped, overactive in his chest.
The Vampire’s claws dug into the flesh of his neck until blood was drawn, smashing his windpipe closed and he was forced to look.
Except, when he did, it wasn't the stranger he’d asked Lestat to send–the one he’d felt in the shadows, ready to obliterate him. Instead it was Armand, yellow eyes wide and frantic, desperate to end him, once more.
Weakly, Daniel smiled.
Armand’s jaw tightened, anger throbbing in the neck of his veins, even as Daniel's own were pulsing under the pressure. Then, as if to keep himself from snapping Daniel's twig neck under too much strength, Armand threw his head forward and bit into his jugular.
There was no subtlety or elegance in the action, nothing like the show that he and Louis had put on for him in Dubai. This was fury and revenge rolled into one. He was draining Daniel as if to suck out his bone marrow, holding him down with the absolute and overpowering strength of an ancient vampire. At some point during his feeding frenzy, Daniel barely registered that Armand had dragged him into the empty station bathroom, locking them in.
Daniel’s back was pressed to the wall with the pressure of a train, blood hemorrhaging from him as his eyes fluttered against the fluorescent strip lights overhead.
He pulled back just as Daniel’s vision began to stutter like the empty station of a television screen, knees buckling underneath him as his strength ran out. Then, Armand dove back in, wrapping an arm around Daniel’s back, digging into his shirt beneath his leather jacket, his sturdy hand propping up his spine being the only real thing keeping Daniel from collapsing to the ground.
“I wanted…” Daniel breathed, even as he felt himself going insanely light headed and limp. “To see what you would do.”
Armand froze. Teeth still dug into his flesh, hands and body going rigid. He pulled back, jaw dripping with red, jutted out and shaking.
Then, he growled. With very little fanfare, he threw Daniel against the bathroom tiles like a rag doll by his neck, cracking the porcelain with the back of his head.
Daniel blinked, disoriented, spine and heart still tingling, screaming for blood, even as the image of Armand was hazy above him like an apparition.
With shaky fingers, he reached around to feel the back of his head, noting the way his curls were warm and wet with his own blood, staining his fingers with it. There was a divot where there shouldn't be.
Neither of them spoke, just stared at each other like they were sitting, waiting in the eye of a storm.
Armand’s breaths were wild. There was something so feral and terrifying about him this way. It lit up Daniel's primal instincts, and maybe if they weren't so twisted and backwards, maybe if he were a normal person, he'd know that now is when he should run.
He marveled instead in the fascination and appeal of how this Armand was miles better than the masks and performances in Dubai.
He was a beautiful, disgusting creature, and it made Daniel shiver to his core. He wondered vaguely if it was with awe or delirium, considering the way he was fading from coherency.
“Where did you get this?” Armand accused, raising the picture in the air, bringing him back.
“I thought you said we wouldn’t talk again unless I called,” Daniel goaded him, grunting and moving to a sitting position against the walls. His head was already beginning to mend itself back together again, but he still rubbed at it, wincing as it stung, his fingers slippery with blood. The concussion gave him a sense of vertigo, like he was staring at Armand from the wrong angle and he was somehow standing on the wall instead of the floor.
Armand’s anger was sharp, his perfect posture only accentuating it. So, when his head tilted to the side as if to return the taunt, it made Daniel’s skin shiver.
“But you did call me, beloved,” he whispered bitterly, throwing the photo down to Daniel’s chest, crumpling it as it fell. Daniel grabbed the photo from his chest where Armand’s eyes had landed accusatorily and he held it up to look at again.
Daniel breathed hard, staring at it once more, then asked:
“Is this even real?”
Armand’s face faltered microscopically before he recovered.
“...Of course it isn't.”
Daniel swallowed. A thumb had smeared blood over his smiling face in the picture, the streak translucent enough to see his smile still, even if it was choked by streaks of red.
“How long?” he whispered, still not looking away.
“I just told you it was a fabrication.”
Wincing, Daniel sat up more fully. He let the photo fall to his lap, taking one more sharp breath, feeling like the dizziness was beginning to subside.
“You don’t even know where I got this photo from,” he accused.
“Sam, probably, since you and he have been so close lately, I’ll assume it was the Talamasca.”
Armand’s words came out biting and petty, his chin down with derision soaking the ends of his sentences.
Daniel let his head rest on the tiles behind him, skull still aching with a heartbeat sensation.
“And you know that… “Daniel started carefully, as if to try and get Armand to see how easy he was to see through right now. “...because you were stalking me…”
And, as he said it, he could see the cracks in Armand's facade: his eyes reeked of desperation and insecurity. His violent acts towards Daniel may have cooled, but beneath the anger, Daniel was starting to see the layers that were saturated in fear.
Like he would give anything right now for Daniel not to see through him, not realizing that would be his exact undoing.
Fuck.
It was exactly that moment that made Daniel sure that every one of the photos in the box in his hotel were genuine. They had been together, in whatever capacity that meant. Daniel felt the truth of it settle inside him.
Using his blood-soaked hand, he crawled his way to standing, smearing the tile walls behind him in his shaky ascent. Armand waited, as if unsure, yet again, whether he wanted to help Daniel or attack him–an impulse Daniel was beginning to become familiar with at this point.
“What did you hope to prove by inviting an attack on yourself?” Armand breathed, as if he were finally starting to deflate from the more potent edges of his anger.
Daniel blinked, unphased.
“You already know,” he said.
Armand’s voice cracked: “What if I had allowed you to be killed?"
Daniel squared his shoulders, the room feeling warmer and tighter than it had only a moment ago.
“You didn’t,” he said plainly.
Armand pursed his lips tightly: “Reckless.”
“And you are a fucking liar, Armand. This–” he held the photo up in the air, shaking it for emphasis. “Is a fucking joke. Because if this is real, if we were—” Daniel cleared his throat, feeling it close off as he tried to say the words. Instead, he tried a different tack:
“Did you erase my memories?” he accused.
Armand looked away.
“I already told you that photo is not real.”
He reached forward and snatched it from Daniel, tossing it to the floor as if to emphasize his point.Daniel laughed, shoving his hands in his pockets, staring at the ceiling.
“Unbelievable.”
Armand bristled, then said bitterly. “You said it yourself, the idea of us is a fucking joke.”
Hearing Armand retaliate using his own obscenities felt more wrong and mocking than anything else said as of yet. Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. Armand’s posture was conflicted… like an animal gearing to flee or fight, but he hadn’t decided which one yet.
“Let’s say we did date, or fuck…” Daniel started slowly.
Armand smiled tightly with his lips closed, expression snide: “Which we didn’t.”
“Sure,” Daniel said.
He leaned against the wall again, kicking away the broken tile from under his feet, sprinkling his shoe with the white dust of the broken grout. His brain was whirring with the kind of adrenaline he craved from his journalistic work, trying to place together the pieces of a story only half-told.
“Why make me forget?” he prodded, hands deepening in his pockets, eyes drifting to the mutilated photo on the ground. “Regret?”
He finally braved a look at Armand’s face and it was… conflicted. Always so fucking conflicted.
For a moment, Daniel expected more lies, more denials. It almost felt to him that Armand could endlessly squirm under scrutiny. Lie and hide forever without a single authentic syllable.
So, it almost surprised him when Armand looked… cornered. As if he weren't the one pinning Daniel up against a wall with his enormous power and rage.
“The past is buried and gone,” he said softly. Darkly. Like a warning. “Let it die, Daniel.”
There was a long pause between them and they digested the spoken words.
Daniel felt… angry. Helpless. If Armand's anger had been overwhelming, the way he demanded Daniel's retreat made him feel small. Insulted.
He took a step forward and Armand moved in a very tiny flinch. He froze, then chose to ignore it, taking another step.
Somehow Armand looked so skittish. So small. Anger built inside his chest as he thought of the way he'd called to him in Dubai, drowning in his own blood and desperation. Before even this moment, Daniel wasn't sure why he'd felt so terrified of Armand leaving. Why his chest had felt ripped in two watching him walk away, Armand cloaked in indifference that burned and scarred Daniel in ways he didn't understand.
Why he called for him so desperately.
He felt hurt turning sour in his chest. Churning into derision.
And he smiled bitterly. Then laughed, getting too close, itching to claw. To provoke.
“I left you, didn't I?" he said slowly. Coldly. “Abandoned you, just like Louis.”
It only took a second and hands were wrapping around him again. Shoving his head against the tiles, his newly healed head wound opening back up again.
It was just like Dubai, Armand’s emotions spilling over into Daniel like threats and whispers. Too much, too tight, strangling him, literally, around his throat.
Armand might kill him. This time for real.
He was going to die in a train station bathroom, by the hands of an ex-lover he couldn't even remember, yet somehow ached for and hated simultaneously.
Armand stared, long and hard–a god trying to decide the fate of a small, insignificant thing beneath him. A lover, trying to parse through the painful emotional weight that threatened to drown them.
Stuck between both and neither.
Then, as if whatever cord between the two had finally snapped, Armand leaned in and kissed him.
It was reckless, violent even, as he held him pinned against the wall at his mercy.
Fuck, it was… Daniel grabbed onto Armand tightly, almost out of some forgotten reflex, kissing him back, swallowing a whine as Armand’s fingernails tightened, dragging against his jugular as he choked him.
Armand’s face was a million emotions when he pulled back–angry, overcome, conflict etched into the trace lines of his expression.
“I hate you,” he whispered, even if there was no threat in it. Then, he leaned forward, slowly and carefully, and kissed Daniel again, this time soft and yearning. The silence held them both in place as he stopped the assault against Daniel’s neck.
Soft kisses. Gentle, returned by them both as if there weren’t blood and rubble beneath them like a bad omen of their affections. It felt… right, somehow. Like coming back to a home he’d forgotten. Something he didn’t know he’d been aching for.
When they stopped, their eyes stayed locked, breathing, falling into the way they looked the same–maker and fledgling, yellow eyes that forever bound them together in ways that Daniel was sure he couldn't yet understand.
Armand gently raised Daniel’s wrist to his mouth, placing a gentle peck along his veins where blood still dripped down as if to soothe him. As if it weren’t Armand himself that had broken him in the first place. His eyes were ethereal and beautiful, drowning Daniel’s ever-buzzing mind into obeying the silence Armand demanded of them. Sinking into him deeper.
“I hate you, Daniel.” Armand said, words airy with too much breath. Then, with a strange dichotomy of softness, he bit into Daniel’s wrist, beginning to suck his blood once more in small, light streams, with all the violence of a caress.
Then, as if they hadn’t just been miles, years apart, one of his hands reached out and settled on Daniel’s chest as if feeling for his heartbeat. When he dropped Daniel’s wrist once again, his fingers continued to trace over his chest softly, dragging his nails across the thin fabric.
“I hate you,” he exhaled again, as if directing the words straight to Daniel’s chest–to his heart.
Armand closed his eyes, breathing. Just holding Daniel there with his palm laid across his chest. Feeling.
Then, so much quieter than every other spoken word:
“I love you.”
And, before Daniel could react, before he could stop Armand or chase him, before he could even process, Armand ran, disappearing into the dwindling night leaving Daniel battered, bleeding and alone inside the train station bathroom, standing over the crumpled, bloody picture of them together on the floor.