Work Text:
Daniel crossed the river on his Harley, the light from the lampposts that lined the bridge flashing by, reflecting off of his sunglasses. The wind was whipping his hair and face, and his heart was pounding like it hadn’t in months.
He couldn’t believe he'd finally found him.
In the sleepiest of sleepy towns.
The house itself was easy to locate. Daniel parked his bike in the empty driveway and looked up at the building. It looked extremely non-descript. The yard was a little overgrown, the curtains a little dated, but the property didn’t stand out from the neighboring houses in any significant way.
The lights were off but that didn’t mean anything. They could both see in the dark.
He knew Armand was in there.
Just like he knew that Armand knew that Daniel was coming for him.
Daniel slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and put away his sunglasses.
The door was unlocked, like he knew it would be. He entered the house and went straight for the kitchen.
Armand was sitting on the dinner table, one leg pulled up to his chin, the other dangling off the edge. The rest of the table was filled with boxes. The one closest to Armand was open and half-filled with 8-inch floppy disks. Armand had one in his hands and was shredding it into tiny pieces.
Judging by the mess on the floor, he'd been at it for a while.
“You found me.”
Armand didn’t look up at Daniel when he said it, didn’t stop shredding the floppy disk.
The way he moved while destroying the disk reminded Daniel of their first meeting in San Francisco, when Armand had unspooled Daniel’s interview tapes. There seemed to be no anger underlying Armand's actions this time, though.
And Daniel was no longer afraid of him.
“No shit,” was all Daniel said in reply.
“How did you find me?”
Daniel leaned against the doorframe, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Oh, you know me. I’m like a dog with a bone. A real stubborn asshole. Plus, I got all the time in the world these days. Especially now the book tour’s over.”
Armand scoffed. “The book tour. That book is going to get us all killed.”
“Probably, yeah. Here.” Daniel dug through his bag and pulled out a copy of Interview With the Vampire. “Brought you a signed copy.” He flung the book at Armand like a Frisbee.
Armand caught it, looked at it for a second and then placed it on one of the boxes that was still taped shut. He picked up another floppy disk to shred.
Daniel looked around the room. There were boxes on every surface. A couple of empty ones thrown into a corner next to the unplugged fridge.
“Are these those secret writings you used to do on your computer back in the eighties?” Daniel asked.
“Yes.”
“You ever gonna tell me what’s on ‘em? More self-insert fan fiction about you and Lestat? The truth about who killed Kennedy? Was it you? You could already walk in the sun back then, right?”
Armand didn’t take the bait. “Secret then, secret now,” he replied dispassionately.
“Right.” Daniel nodded. “Unworthy in San Francisco, unworthy in Dubai, unworthy in…whatever shithole town we’re in now.”
“Durand, Wisconsin.”
“Yeah, I fucking know we’re in Wisconsin.”
Armand stopped moving. He stared at the floor. “You’re angry with me.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious. Hey, since we’re just saying shit we both already know, I've got another one for ya: you took off.”
“I did.”
“Bit of a dick move, don’t you think?”
“It was for the best,” Armand whispered. He still hadn’t looked at Daniel once.
“And you get to decide that on your own? Without saying a single word to me?” Daniel pushed off from the doorframe and took a couple of steps into the room. He dropped his duffel bag onto the floor. “I just wake up with you gone. All this bullshit about how you love me so much you’d rather die yourself than see me die, and you take off before I’ve even come down from that damn fledgling high?!”
“You were strong enough to make it on your own.”
“Fuck you. I’m good now, but I was a fucking mess. Louis had to come in and clean up after you.”
Armand laughed.
He fucking laughed.
“You want to tell me what’s funny about that?”
Armand finally looked at him. “You have to appreciate the irony. When I’d spent decades cleaning up after him.”
“You were just covering your own ass back then. And you’ll have to excuse me for not laughing when I’m the mess you left on the floor. You were strong enough to make it on your own,” Daniel repeated in what he knew was a terrible impression of Armand’s accent. “I didn’t want to do it on my own, you immortal idiot! And I shouldn’t have had to.”
They stared at each other, the sudden silence heavy between them.
Then Armand’s face crumpled.
“I ruined it.”
“Yeah.”
“I had you back and then I ruined it. I broke my vow. I cursed you into darkness. I was weak and I couldn’t stand to let you die and so I ruined you for selfish – ”
“Hey, no, wait a second,” Daniel interrupted. “That’s not what ruined it.” Was it?
“Wasn’t it?”
Was it?
“No,” Daniel said, to himself as much as to Armand. “I turned out just fine, thanks. What ruined it was you running away and leaving me in that dump.”
Armand dropped the last shred of plastic to the floor, pulled his other knee up to his chin as well and wrapped both his arms around his legs, hugging them to his chest. It made him look smaller than he was. Young.
“It’s what I do,” he whispered.
Daniel shook his head. “Nah. I mean, sure, you fuck things up. Royally. I’m not gonna deny that – I don’t do delusion on that scale. But running away? That’s new. That doesn’t fit your M.O. at all. See, what you do, Armand, is you stay.” Daniel jabbed his finger in Armand’s direction. “You stay looong after you’ve stopped having fun. Cause you don’t have the balls to leave. You stay and you suffer and you wait for someone else to come along and bust you out.”
Daniel started counting on his fingers. “You let Lestat blow up your cult, you let Louis torch the theater. You let me come to Dubai and expose your bullshi – ”
“I never meant for Louis to find out.”
“Yeah, right. But you didn’t stop him from inviting me. Didn’t stop me from coming and doing the interview. Sure, you made a couple of half-assed attempts at gaslighting the shit out of us, but if you really didn’t want the truth to come out, there’s about a hundred points along the way where you could’ve stopped it.”
Armand sighed. “Daniel.”
“Don’t you fucking ‘Daniel’ me! I’m still talking. You could’ve destroyed the tapes, made sure the invitation got lost in the ‘mail’. You could’ve made Louis forget he wanted to ask me over. Hell, you could’ve made him forget I ever existed, like you made him forget fuck knows what else. Like you made me,” he added, his voice cracking, “forget you!”
Daniel gasped for air he strictly speaking didn’t need.
Armand didn’t say anything. He just sat there, staring with that – what did Louis call it? That half blank, half apocalyptic look.
Daniel wanted to run up to him and shake him until he said something. Anything.
“I thought we had moved past that,” Armand finally said.
Okay, maybe not anything, because that pissed Daniel right back off again.
“Yeah, well, so did I. I thought we’d moved past all that bullshit, but it turns out I was wrong.”
Daniel sighed. He was so tired. So angry but so tired. And Armand just fucking sat there. Curled up like a sad, wet cat with those big, I-could-not-prevent-it eyes. Too much of a victim to do anything about the mess he’d created.
Maybe that wasn’t fair, but neither was the way Armand had dumped him.
Daniel shook his head. “Look at you. The great vampire Armand, the oldest coward in the world. Five centuries of staying. Never made another vampire in his life because the notion repulses him so much. Then along comes little old me and it turns out I’m the love of his life. The one that almost got away. Isn’t that romantic?” he spat, years – decades – of hurt spilling out.
Armand closed his eyes and let his head fall forward, forehead pressed to his knees, so his face was hidden.
“And they love each other so much,” Daniel went on, unrelenting, ignoring the tears welling up in his own eyes, ignoring the fact that he was doing exactly what he had accused Louis of doing during the interview; switching to more impersonal language when things became too personal.
“And for a little while it’s almost perfect, you know? But the old man is dying and it’s all so fucking tragic, so the ancient immortal breaks his big, solemn vow never to make another vampire. They decide to give it a shot. Surely they can make it work, right? But no, Armand takes one look at his fledgling – at me – and he’s so repulsed by what he’s done he breaks his 500 year streak of staying put and runs.”
Daniel kicked one of the open boxes standing on the floor, sending it flying up against the extractor fan above the stove in an explosion of floppy disks. “Don’t I feel special!”
He was breathing heavily again. He ran his hands over his face and they came away wet with blood tears.
“I couldn’t process what I’d done,” Armand said. His voice was soft and even, but with an undertone of panic. “The weight of it. The changes I had wrought in you.” He looked up at Daniel. His eyes were filled with tears and dismay. “I… The Dark Gift burned away everything that made you…”
“Fascinating?” Daniel suggested. He knew it was petty (and potentially counterproductive), but he felt like he’d earned the right to be a little petty where Armand was concerned.
A flash of irritation passed over Armand’s face, there and gone again within a second. “Human,” he corrected. “I’m sure you’re still very fascinating, Daniel.”
Daniel threw up his hands. “Human no longer human after being made a vampire. What a shocker!”
Armand ignored him. “I could see it in your eyes, which are my eyes. I’d turned you from a beautiful, living thing, a boy obsessed with something he couldn’t fully understand, into a literal cold-blooded killer.”
Daniel scoffed. “As if that isn’t what you are.”
Now it was Armand who sent one of the boxes filled with decades-old secrets flying. “It’s exactly what I am, Daniel! That’s precisely the problem. I turned you into what I am.” He’d jumped to his feet when he threw the box, but now he slumped back against the table, sitting down on the very edge of it.
“You’re not so bad,” Daniel replied, and he meant it, despite just having yelled at Armand about all the ways in which the older vampire sucked. He had loved Armand so much – still loved him – not in spite of his monstrosity but because of it.
“I’m a monster.” Armand echoed Daniel’s thoughts like he could still read his mind.
“So?”
“And now so are you!”
“So?” Daniel repeated. “I knew that’s what I’d be going in, and so did you. Monsters together. Forever. That’s what you promised me.”
“I am made up of broken promises and disappointment,” Armand pronounced flatly.
Daniel scoffed again. “And fucking melodrama.”
Armand silently slid back onto the table, reverting back to that fetal position, legs pulled up to his chin, and rested his cheek on his knees. He was facing Daniel but his eyes weren’t focused on the other vampire. God only knew what was going on in that beautiful, messed-up mind of his.
This would’ve been so much easier if they really had been able to hear each other’s thoughts.
Daniel walked over to the kitchen counter, ripped open one of the boxes and grabbed himself a floppy disk to tear up while he leaned against the formica counter top. Armand followed him with his eyes.
After he’d reduced the flexible outer disk to confetti and the hard inner disk to dust, Daniel took two more disks from the box and tossed one of them to Armand.
They destroyed about a dozen of the things between them before either of them spoke again. It felt weirdly therapeutic.
“Daniel, that leather jacket is an absolute travesty,” Armand said. “What happened to the one I had made for you?”
“Yeah, that’s kind of a long story.”
“I have time.”
Daniel reached into the box again. Threw a disk to Armand, grabbed another for himself. “I torched it because I was pissed off at you.”
“That’s not a very long story at all.”
They looked at each other while their hands kept working.
Everything that had ever existed between them was still there. It would always be there. And they both knew it.
There was no point trying to deny it or trying to escape it. That whole vampire bond was no joke either, but they’d been chained to each other long before that, really. Maybe as far back as that first look they’d exchanged back at Polynesian Mary’s.
For better or for worse.
“I’m still pissed off at you,” Daniel said. There was no heat to his voice, just a kind of worn-out resignation. Like his love for Armand, the fact that they occasionally annoyed the Hell out of each other was just another inevitability of life.
Armand nodded. “I understand.”
“See, I don’t think you do. Cause you think you did something to me. Something bad, some sort of irreparable damage that, I don’t know, violated me to the depths of my being or whatever.”
Armand looked away, his lips pressed tightly together.
“But you didn’t! I’m great. And if you don’t want to be with me anymore now I’m a vampire, that’s fine. I mean, it would be lame and cowardly and a total cop-out, but it’s, you know, whatever. I’ve been dumped before. But don’t dump me because you feel guilty for giving me something I’m happy with.”
“You’re happy?” Armand asked like the concept of happiness was completely alien to him.
“With this?” Daniel motioned down the length of his own body. “Fuck, yes! I’m strong, I’m fast, I can see for fucking miles. I’m not sick anymore and I never will be again. My joints don’t creak, my hands don’t shake. And it’s not just that, it’s…”
Daniel felt like he was doing a bad job explaining. It wasn’t just the physical stuff. He looked around the room like the right words might jump out at him.
“It’s like… Okay, start of the book tour, right? About two weeks in. This woman named Trish comes up to me at a signing. Gorgeous gal, 55 years old, great rack. Asked me to sign her copy of Under the Burning Sky. I was feeling her, she was feeling me. We end up having drinks, she asks me back to her place. I came three times. Three times, Armand! And I could’ve kept on going except I, uh, well, I kinda ate her.” Daniel scratched the back of his neck.
“Why are you telling me this, Daniel? Are you trying to make me jealous?”
“I’m trying to tell you that I’m having an absolute ball with this immortality gig. I feel like I’m twenty again, only better. I’m on top of the fucking world. But I would be having a much better time,” he added, slowing down, suddenly feeling like he did when he was fifteen and he tried to ask out Lotti Carmichael even though she was a senior and kinda dating this guy who was already in college and she was definitely going to shoot him down. “…if you were with me,” he finished. “Like you promised you’d be.”
Armand stared at him, for too long, without blinking. They’d both stopped breathing a while ago.
About twenty teenagers had watched and laughed when Lotti Carmichael had told Daniel there was no way in Hell she’d go out with a skinny little punk like him.
“You’d still have me?” Armand asked.
An enormous weight Daniel hadn’t realized he’d been carrying fell from his shoulders. Because Armand’s question meant that he would still have Daniel.
And of course Armand would doubt the fact that Daniel still wanted him. Because that’s what he did, wasn’t it? Armand had spent so long thinking he was nothing more than his looks and his skills and his ability to serve, it had taken a thousand I love yous and I’m stayings from Daniel before Armand had believed he was worthy of love just for who he was.
Of course he'd run when he thought he’d fucked up.
“No, I just spent the better part of three years trying to find you just so I could yell at you,” Daniel said, because seriously. Only Armand would think Daniel would chase him to the end of the world just to tell him he was an asshole.
And apparently Armand still did believe that, because his brow furrowed slightly, his eyes went dark and he absentmindedly reached for the box that was no longer there (because he had hurled it at the wall), for another floppy disk to take his emotions out on.
“Of course I’ll still have you!” Daniel called out. He could only just keep himself from throwing up his hands again. “Babe. There’s nothing in the world that’s going to keep me from wanting to be with you. I’m in this for the long haul. Thought I’d made that clear, but I’ll tell you a hundred times a night until you believe it. The question is… Do you still want me?”
Daniel hoped he didn’t sound too pathetic when he asked the question. He felt pretty pathetic. “Or do I actually…repulse you now?”
Armand straightened up abruptly and shook his head. “You could never repulse me, Daniel. I mean, that jacket – ”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time, don’t get cute.”
Armand smiled for the first time since Daniel had walked through the door. Half shy, half mischievous. It was the best thing Daniel had seen in years and Daniel felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief.
“So what do you say?” Daniel asked. “Wanna…go out and grab a bite to eat? We could be in Minneapolis in an hour.”
Armand unfolded himself, letting his legs dangle off the edge of the table, and leaned forward a little. “Are you asking me out on a date, Daniel Molloy?”
“I’m asking you out on a hunt,” Daniel corrected. “But I wouldn’t be mad if we had some absolutely filthy make-up sex afterwards.”
The corners of Armand’s mouth curled upwards. Then his face fell again. “And you’ll stay?” he asked like he wasn’t the one who’d run off.
“Yes, I'll stay. I mean, we might need some time off fifty years down the line, but I know I’ll never be able to quit you completely. We’ll work it out, get back together. It’s kinda what we do.”
Armand still hesitated. And Daniel sort of got it. Forever was a big ask. Maybe he shouldn’t have expected it from Armand the first time around.
“I’ll let you ride my bike?” Daniel said in a sing-song voice, the inflection rising at the end.
“You have a motorcycle?”
“I do. Big fucking beast, to go with the, uh, terrible end-of-life crisis jacket. When’s the last time you were on one?”
“Paris.”
Fuck, that was bleak. Daniel hadn't even been born yet when Armand and Louis had left Paris.
Daniel fished the keys to his Harley from his jacket pocket, tossed them at Armand. “Let’s go.”
Armand looked at Daniel, at the keys in his hands, back at Daniel.
Daniel’s own hands felt sweaty, which was new. He didn’t think vampires had that problem.
He still wasn’t sure how Armand would answer. What if Armand bolted right now? He kinda looked like he might.
Blank. Apocalyptic. Fight, flight and freeze fighting for control behind his fiery eyes.
Armand didn’t bolt.
Instead, he closed his fingers over the keys. “Yes,” he said emphatically.
And Daniel knew he wasn’t just saying Yes to a bike ride and sloppy make-up sex.
This was Yes to forever. Capital F Forever. With maybe a little break here and there.
Daniel nodded. “Okay.”
Armand nodded as well and got down from the table.
Daniel walked over to where his bag lay on the floor and bent down to pick it up. By the time he straightened up again, Armand was standing right in front of him.
Armand put a hand on Daniel’s cheek. His touch was electrifying. Daniel could feel his own heart pounding under Armand’s palm, like his blood was trying to reach Armand’s.
“You’re still so beautiful,” Armand whispered.
“Still give great head, too,” Daniel replied.
“Still insufferable, as well, I see.”
“Good thing you like suffering.”
Armand put his other hand on Daniel’s other cheek and kissed him.
The kiss was chaste, no tongue, full of meaning.
It was amazing.
Armand drew back and smiled at Daniel, his hands still on Daniel’s face.
And things were alright again. A little fragile, maybe, but alright.
“Come,” Armand ordered, like he had done thousands of times before, like he would do a million more times in the future. He slipped his hand into Daniel’s and started leading him outside. “I’m buying you a new jacket tomorrow.”
“You’d better.”
“I love you.”
“I know. You don’t want to take any of this?” Daniel asked with a nod at the boxes they passed on their way out.
Armand shook his head. “They belong in the past. They were unimportant then, they’re insignificant now. I’ll tell you who really killed John F. Kennedy some other time,” he added before opening the front door for Daniel.
Daniel couldn’t tell if Armand was being serious about the Kennedy part or not, and there was something very familiar and comforting about that.
Armand ran his hand over the blood red metal frame of Daniel’s Harley. “It suits you.”
“Thanks.”
Armand stuck the keys in the ignition and mounted the bike. Daniel climbed on behind him.
When they reached the end of the driveway, Armand stopped and looked back at the house. Daniel wondered how long he had been staying there.
“You ready to go?” Daniel asked after a couple of seconds. “I’m, uh, getting pretty hungry. It’s been a while since I fed.”
Armand hummed, tipped his head to the side.
Then suddenly the entire house was on fire, from the dated curtains to the roof cornicing to the signed copy of Interview With the Vampire they had left in the kitchen. A complete inferno.
“Holy shit!” Daniel laughed. “That’s one way to put the past behind you.”
“Well, you did say I was made of melodrama.”
Daniel laughed again. “I love you, too.”
“I know.”
Daniel tightened his grip on Armand’s waist, put his chin on Armand’s shoulder. Armand revved the engine and they were off.
On their way to hunt in Minneapolis.
On their way to Forever.