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Daniel felt a tear try to fall, hot and insistent, at the corner of his eye. He swiped it away with a vicious jerk of his thumb, the skin of his cheekbone scraping rough against his knuckle.
"What did Alice say, when you finally asked her to marry you?"
Asshole, he thought.
Daniel couldn’t help it if he’d felt a little more petulant than usual, snapping more than he meant to and caring less each time he did. He’s not completely sure as to why, talking about Paris always put him on edge, but the awareness that he’d been toyed with and made a fool of by a twisted, two-faced predatory monster masquerading as a soft-spoken, inoffensive, and servile human boy made for a strong second. He didn’t know why he cared so much. He told himself he despised deception; prided himself on clawing through lies to uncover the truth, but it’s been long since he felt resentment this raw, this personal.
And it showed.
Armand, of course, was the first to grasp why he kept shit talking Paris. His eyes expanding with a flicker of quiet astonishment at this discovery.
He managed to evade the topic, and the vampire, at least, had the decency to let him.
But he did not learn his lesson. He kept the pesky, mocking tone all throughout the interview. Again, he couldn’t help it. The only thing worse than hearing them wax poetic about Paris was being subjected to the whole soul-twins display; the finishing each other's sentences, the smiling, the hand holding, the cringy jokes trying to get Daniel to fall for it. It was another terrible put-on scene. And it was gonna drive him up the wall.
In retrospect, he should have seen it coming. Louis was much less forgiving than he would like to believe he is.
Another tear, and Daniel felt his chest contract with his own anger. He admitted he could have reined in his temper, but he wasn’t the one paying for a trip down memory lane. Nor had he ever asked to play therapist to a fucking vampire who’d decided to go grave-robbing in the private cemetery of his past. He refused to be embarrassed over something that passed almost forty years ago, heartbroken over someone that he barely knew any longer, who hated his guts enough to pretend he never existed. And yet, that was exactly what he felt. It’d been a while since he dwelled in that particular memory, buried as it was in the back of his mind where Daniel could ignore it until it faded. It never did.
He heard steps coming in his direction and straightened his spine, pretended to look over his notes and his computer. It was probably gonna be Real Rashid, sent to collect him and tell him he should sleep, that it’s already past sunrise. As if the blackened windows of this luxurious tomb weren’t proof enough that day and night were now concepts decided by others. Daniel didn’t want to go to bed, there was no point, sleep wouldn’t have him today.
To his surprise, it was not Real Rashid there.
"Louis has gone to sleep." The voice was smooth, accented, and utterly unexpected. Daniel didn’t look up. Since when did the Vampire Armand deign to make sound when he moved?
Had he really looked that pathetic out there that even this bloodsucking prick was taking pity on him?
The little reaction he got to his thought told him enough.
"He wants to profoundly apologize for what transpired earlier." Armand continued, his tone a diplomat’s. "It was an invasion of privacy. He crossed a line. And it shouldn’t have happened."
“Why do you do that?” Daniel’s own voice was gravel, scraped raw. He fixed his gaze on some recording icon in his computer as if it were the most interesting thing.
"Do what?"
"Apologize in Louis’ name. It’s the second time you've done it. You should stop. He isn’t sorry."
He was curious about this. He’d been before as well, wondered why Rashid felt entitled to offer regret on his employer’s name when he was just too happy to make Daniel pay for pushing for details on Claudia. As Armand, it made even less sense.
"He is remorseful. He’s also just… proud."
"You’re prouder," Daniel said. This, he knew. He was good at reading people, it was part of the job. He felt a petty, hollow victory when Armand didn’t deny it.
"He knows how to hit exactly where it hurts. It is in his nature. If I hadn’t said anything about the way you were taunting him—"
"But I was taunting him. Why do you care?"
Armand goes stiffer than he was before. Daniel was no vampire but even he could hear him think desperately for an answer. Empathy was the simpler one, the one Daniel would have used as a lie, that would require, however, for Armand to have heard of it.
"You’re right. It was an error in judgment.”
It was said as a closing remark, but…
"Wait."
Daniel finally turned. He looked at the perfect, ageless face, a mask of serene beauty that hid fathomless, calculating depths. The reporter pushed past the man.
"You told me Alice wanted to say yes, but she didn’t trust me. That’s not what she told me."
Armand simply gazed at him. "What did she tell you?
"Don’t you know it?" Daniel said, not without some venom. He hoped Armand wasn’t about to start pretending he wasn’t in his head as much as Louis.
I just don’t see the point in it. What is an insignificant paper worth? Can’t you love me as we are? Twelve years, does that mean nothing to you? It does to me! Why do you want to do this to me? To us?
What big bunch of bullshit. She was gone in less than a year. In what universe did she want to say yes?
"You knew she wanted to say yes." Said Armand. "Maybe if you hadn’t loved the powders and syringes more than her."
Daniel wanted to be angry. He knew nothing. There was nothing he’d ever loved more than Alice. He would have done anything, been anything, to make her happy. To make her stay.
The fury boiled up to his throat, a scalding retort ready to launch.
And then it died
It came apart quietly, reduced to ashes by a single question he’d been asking his whole life: Then why didn’t you?
He didn’t know why he wasn’t angry. He only knew the hollow shape of answers that didn’t feel enough. Cause I didn’t know where she was, Cause she didn’t want me anymore, Cause she will come back, she will realize she misses me and take me back, Cause I don’t need her, I can love Sarah, I can love the kids and the house and I can have a real wife now, Cause the only thing I really need is my work anyway.
He met Armand’s gaze, and in those ancient knowing eyes he saw not accusation, but a mirror. His own sadness. Maybe he’d been too harsh. Even immortal pricks had to know a thing or two about heartbreaks and loneliness, maybe more than most.
"Way more, I would say."
"What I said earlier, it wasn’t a free pass, you know."
"You think loudly. Especially when you are in pain. " Armand’s tone was flat, stripped of its usual velvet condescension. "It is… inconvenient."
"Inconvenient, " Daniel repeated, a bitter laugh catching in his throat. He ran a hand over his face, the weariness of the long night, the longer decades, settling into his bones. "Yeah. Tell me about it. " He gestured vaguely at the room, at the world beyond the lightless windows. "All of this is pretty goddamn inconvenient. "
He expected a retort. A cool dismissal. He didn’t expect Armand to take a single, silent step closer.
"You did well without her." The statement was delivered like a clinical diagnosis. “You got clean. Got the recognition, the prizes. The wife and kids. She was holding you back. You were better of—"
"Shut up." Daniel said. The words were low, a warning that sounded sharp enough to betray the nature of who was the true predator in the room. He could picture Armand laughing at him in his mind, but he could not care less. He didn’t want to hear this. He’d told himself different variations of Armand’s words over the years, in his darkest, most self-preserving moments, or whenever the pain struck him.
“It is the truth,” Armand insisted, relentless.
"It’s not." Daniel’s voice rose, fraying at the edges. "Do not talk about her! It is none of your goddamn business!"
Daniel hated that these bloodsucking sons of bitches had found out this about him, the very only sore spot he could not pretend not to care about. He had other wounds, other shames, his journalist’s career was built on them, and he could present those with a wry smile, a cynical punchline. A turned cheek. But not her. He could not stand it. Even after thirty-seven years, he still loved her.
He saw in Armand’s eyes a look akin to pain, muted, restrained, as if he were fighting to hide it even while it threatened to surface.
"Save it," Daniel snarled, turning his eyes away from the vampire. "I don't need your pity."
"I don’t make a habit out of feeling pity." Armand's voice was a whisper now, it seemed to originate inside Daniel's own skull.
Right, he knew that. Strange that for a heartbeat, Armand had sounded almost human, and that unsettled Daniel more than any threat could.
"Good," Daniel finally muttered, the word a bitter concession.
Armand moved then, not with his usual preternatural swiftness, but with a slow, deliberate grace that was somehow more unnerving.
"But I can understand you," He came to sit on the edge of the large sofa, a careful, deliberate one foot of space between him and Daniel. Daniel felt a jolt of nervous energy, his pulse spiked, a primal alertness at the predator’s proximity. This wasn’t Rashid maintaining a professional distance. This was something else.
"What?" Daniel asked, his voice still rough. "Having a partner that hates you?"
Armand’s perfect brow furrowed slightly, a minute flicker of disturbance on his otherwise placid face. The question had landed somewhere unexpected.
“I once loved as you love,” Armand said, his gaze fixed on some distant point in the darkened room. His voice was softer now, not the diplomat’s tone nor the mind-reader’s, but something worn and private. “Recklessly. Without restraint and without breath, as though the world began and ended in that one feeling. It was… better for him that it ended.”
Just what he needed. Daniel’s internal sarcasm was a weak shield. A sob story from a five-hundred-year-old monster. But the delivery lacked arrogance. It held the weight of a settled fact, a stone at the bottom of a deep, dark well.
“Better for him, huh?” Daniel echoed, unable to stop himself. “That’s the party line? You let them go for their own good? Spare me the noble vampire routine.”
“Nobility had nothing to do with it. It was a failure of… capability. I could not make him happy; he would continue to deteriorate under my care no matter what I tried."
“You make him sound like a pet.”
Armand’s voice, which had been flowing with the solemn cadence of a confession, hit a fault line. “Why do you have to be like this?” The words were a whisper, but they carried a startling, raw crack. “I’m trying…”
The air seemed to thicken. Daniel felt a sudden, irrational pressure in his own chest, a phantom ache that wasn’t his own. It was a confusing, invasive pulse of emotion—frustration, sorrow, a defensive, wounded pride. Daniel recoiled internally.
“You sound rather affected,” Daniel said, his own voice cool, a deliberate contrast to the fractured one he’d just heard, “for someone who’s in a 77-year-relationship with the ‘love of his life.’”
Armand’s stare, which had been turned inward on that distant pain, snapped back to Daniel. His words were precise, clarifying a mistake Daniel hadn’t even known he’d made. “I never said that.”
The correction landed with a quiet force. Daniel replayed the interviews; the passive commentary, the entire dynamic he’d observed. Armand was right. It had been Louis, and Louis only, who had used that phrase. A lie, obviously, but it was one Armand had never bothered to echo.
“No,” Daniel conceded, the fight draining out, replaced by a weary sort of clarity. “I guess not.”
Daniel let the silence stretch, heavy with the unspoken correction. The air still hummed with the ghost of that cracked voice, that fleeting, real kind of hurt. He was intrigued, against himself.
“So,” Daniel said, leaning back, the leather of the sofa sighing beneath him. His tone was deliberately casual, almost conversational, the kind he used to ask a source about a difficult detail. “I’m going to venture here and imagine that if you’re here begging for crumbs of Louis’s attention, then…” He ticked the options off on his fingers, each one a calculated jab. “A) This fucker didn’t care enough for you to pursue you, in which case I can’t say I blame them. B) He’s dead, and your grand sacrifice had barely any meaning anyway. C) He’s fucking another one of your ex’s now.” Daniel tilted his head, a mockery of professional curiosity. “Am I getting close?”
He watched, waiting for the flash of anger, the cold dismissal, the physical reminder of who held the real power in the room.
Instead, Armand’s lips quirked. It wasn’t a smile. It was the faintest, most bitter acknowledgment of a hit scored. The weariness in his eyes seemed to deepen.
Fine. Fine. Daniel felt officially bad. Armand was right. He could see the parallels now, stark and uncomfortable.
“Listen, I’m gonna be a huge hypocrite here.” Seriously, when had he become a fucking therapist? "Even if you were the one to leave this guy, if he didn’t look for you, if he didn’t care… he’s not worth being hung up on for all eternity. I get you have Louis, but honestly—”
“I didn’t give him the option.” The interruption was swift, sharp.
Daniel blinked. “What does that mean?”
A flicker of something —guilt, shame? —
“He was a mortal. He could never find me.”
Ha. The soundless laugh was pure irony. Another great scheme of the great kind of gaslighting and manipulation, undone by the very control he exerted. Of course.
“The vampire Armand,” Daniel said slowly, the headline writing itself in his mind, “in love with a mortal. Now that’s a story I’m interested in.”
The gaze that met his was no longer wounded, but predatory-cold. The brief window of vulnerability had slammed shut. “You’re a vulture, aren’t you?” Armand said, the words soft as a blade being drawn from silk. “Picking at every scrap of exposed flesh.”
Daniel held the gaze, refusing to flinch. He’d been called worse. “It’s the job. You started talking out of your own free will. You don’t get to be offended when I look for the cracks in the narrative.” He gestured between them, at the charged space where Armand’s ancient heartbreak had just bled into the air. “This is more real than anything Louis has given me in days.”
For a heartbeat, Daniel considered pushing—just to see how far the fracture ran, just to confirm the damage was real. Instead, he swallowed it down. He’d already failed this lesson twice today.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Daniel said. This was a negotiation now, the only language he had left. “I won’t prod you for details, and I won’t bring this up with the ‘not-love-of-your-life’ upstairs, if you make Louis stay away from my memories of Alice. I know she hated me, but I don’t need the reminder every time I ask a difficult question.”
Armand, who had been withdrawing into a shell of cold dignity, went still. His head tilted. “Why do you keep saying that?” he asked, the tense curiosity in his voice more disarming than any threat. “That she hated you? Just because she didn’t agree to marry you?”
The simplicity of the question was a spark to Daniel’s tinder-dry resentment. “Are you serious?” He let out a short, harsh breath that was almost a laugh. “Twelve years. And she didn’t even deign to actually break up with me. Why bother? Let’s just drop the junkie at a detox center and disappear. Pack up, move out, change your name for good measure. No note. No call. Just… gone. You call that love? That’s contempt so deep you can’t even stand to look at the wreckage you’re leaving behind.”
He was breathing heavily now, the old, festering hurt laid bare between them, more real in this moment than the vampire sitting across from him. He expected Armand to dismiss it, to offer another cold, immortal perspective.
Instead, Armand was silent for a long moment, watching him with an expression Daniel couldn’t quite name.
“The worst part is… I can’t even remember what I did to deserve that. Oh, I know I must have done something, some royally fucked up shit, something so awful that she would throw everything we had out the window… it must have been fucked.”
He was rambling now, the words tumbling out, ugly and raw. He hadn’t spoken this truth to anyone, not even to himself in the stark light of day. “For years I thought I must have cheated with some idiot, like I did with Sarah, but… I know I wouldn’t have. Besides, she made me fuck men in front of her all the time, she liked to watch. She was freaky like that.” He paused, a flicker of self-awareness breaking through the flood. “Is that TMI?”
Armand’s expression was unreadable. “Yes,” he said, his voice flat. “But I don’t mind.”
The permission was all Daniel needed to barrel forward. If they were gonna use Daniel as a therapist, he could very well return the favor. “Anyway, even if we hadn’t… I wouldn’t have cheated.”
The doubt hurt as much as it did thirty-seven years ago. What he could have done to make her fall out of love with him. Because, and Daniel had been bent on reminding himself, Alice did love him once too. He regretted being high half the time he was with her; he couldn’t remember her how he would have liked, but this he knew. She loved him. Fiercely, weirdly, completely. And Daniel…
Daniel had never been able to let her go.
There had to have been some small, unforgivable act that had finally shattered her patience. He told himself he must have been reckless, careless, too bratty, too heedless, too lost in his own ambitions and indulgences. He would reconstruct it endlessly in his mind, trying to fill the void with reason, trying to understand the incomprehensible fact that someone could love him so entirely and yet leave without explanation.
He got over the relapse into his addiction after she left him, clawed his way out of the pit, got to writing again, got married, relapsed, had two daughters, relapsed, won two Pulitzers, grew old, and spent forty years knowing that if Alice would just one day forgive whatever he did to her and give him a call, say she misses him, Daniel would drop everything.
He realized he’d been staring at the dark, polished floor, lost in the familiar, torturous loop. When he finally looked up, Armand was watching him not with judgment, but with a stillness that felt like listening.
Daniel cleared his throat, the sound too loud in the quiet room. He felt exposed, the raw nerve he’d just flayed open glistening between them.
“You didn’t have to listen to all that, you know?” Daniel muttered, deflecting with a shrug. “It was sappy and… kind of shitty.”
Armand didn’t reply. For a long moment, he didn’t seem able to form words, his face caught in a strange suspension. His large, uncanny eyes held Daniel’s, he looked like a creature caught between the lights—frozen, snared in a way he never intended to be.
He finally blinked, a slow, deliberate motion.
“It is not sappy,” Armand said, his voice a measured tone, almost soft. “It’s sweet.”
Daniel chuckled. He wanted to sob. Fuck, he was too old for this.
“I’m sure it was not so idyllic on her side of things.” Daniel deflected, desperate to shatter the strange tenderness of the moment. "She was beautiful and collected, and I was a fucking moron. She had to do everything for me. Paid the bills, bought the food, my clothes, my freaking nail clippers.” A ghost of a smile touched his lips, fond and bitter. “Then again, she seemed to love all that crap. It drove me a little crazy. I was a struggling journalist, and she had money. I know it wasn’t traditional, but I kind of was a trophy husband back then. You know I was cute enough in my twenties. When I wasn’t being drained like a blood bag anyway."
He expected a dry retort, a dismissal. He didn’t expect the intensity of Armand’s focus.
“Tell me more,” Armand said, the command so quiet it was almost a request.
The sudden hunger in those words threw Daniel. It wasn’t conversational. It was… personal. Ravenous. “I don’t know, man,” Daniel stalled, suddenly uneasy. “It was a long time ago. It’s just… stuff.”
But Armand was leaning forward now, just an inch, the preternatural stillness around him deepening. “The… nail clippers,” he prompted, the odd specificity hanging in the air. “What kind were they?”
The question was so bizarre, so utterly mundane, that it bypassed Daniel’s defenses entirely. “Uh… silver, I think. Good ones. She said cheap ones crushed the nail instead of cutting it.” The memory surfaced, crisp and absurd. “She’d make me sit on the edge of the bathtub. She’d do my hands, then my feet. Said I couldn’t be trusted not to hack myself to pieces.”
He fell silent, the domestic intimacy of the image—Alice’s cool, capable hands, his own passive surrender—flooding back with a clarity that stole his breath. He hadn’t thought of that in a long time.
Armand had gone very still again, but his eyes were blazing with a dark, unnamable emotion.
Daniel felt a tear trace a hot path down his cheek. The pressure on his chest was getting painful.
“She would get high with me sometimes,’’ Daniel continued, the words spilling out like he could not contain it. "It wasn’t much her thing, too much of a control freak, but I could convince her to let go a bit from time to time. God, we had fun.”
“Did you?” Armand’s voice was barely a whisper, stripped of all artifice.
“Yeah,” Daniel breathed, a broken smile touching his lips. “I don’t remember much of it, but it felt like the time of my life.”
The fire in Armand’s eyes had banked to a deep, smoldering ember. “Did you never… grow bored?”
The question was so foreign it almost made Daniel laugh. “You couldn’t grow bored with Alice. She was a horror, kept me on my toes.”
“There had to be things you didn’t like.”
“I don’t know. Yes, sure,” Daniel conceded, wiping his cheek with the back of his hand. "But even the things I didn’t like, I kinda did? I certainly didn’t like that she was always right.” He let out a wet chuckle. “She overreacted to the smallest of inconveniences. She was controlling. She was clingy… but I kind of loved that.”
He was painting a portrait now, he realized, once he hadn’t been brave enough to see for almost forty years. “She could be so mean, and so loving. She was a complete weirdo. In and out of bed.” His voice dropped, the final admission soft and utterly devastating. “She was… she was everything, man—”
Then Daniel could not continue to babble away forty years of emotional repression because he had the vampire Armand in his arms, kissing him with a fierceness that shattered words into silence.
It happened too fast for him to adjust. Armand’s hands came up, one tangling viciously in the hair at the back of Daniel’s head, tipping it back, the other, clutching a fistful of his sweater at the shoulder, pulling him in with a strength that was desperate. Daniel froze, his mind blank white static, every thought short-circuited.
Then a sound broke from him— torn from the deepest, most neglected part of his soul, and he kissed back.
His own hands came up in answer, one finding the impossibly smooth, cold curve of Armand’s jaw, the other gripping the fine wool at the back of his tailored jacket, holding on as if the world were tilting.
And it was. Armand wasn't careful. He was consuming. His mouth a demand and a plea at once.
Armand broke the kiss as suddenly as he’d initiated it, pulling back just enough to rest his forehead against Daniel’s. Their breaths mingled—one ragged and human, the other practically nonexistent. Armand’s eyes were closed, dark crimson droplets darkened his skin.
“Daniel,” he whispered. “It’s been torture my love, having you here, so close, just within reach."
Daniel’s hands were still on him, one still cradling his waist. He could feel a fine, unnatural tremor running through the vampire’s form.
“You can’t know what it’s been like,” Armand breathed, each syllable trembling with a raw, unvarnished ache Daniel had never imagined him capable of. “To stand in the same room as you, having you just a few steps away and not being able to touch you." His voice dropped to a pained hush. “To hear your beautiful voice and never call my name. That first night I thought I would die of yearning.”
He wrapped his cool hands around the nape of Daniel’s neck, pressing their foreheads together so hard it was almost painful. The intimacy was disorienting. Daniel needed to put space between them, to think clearly. But then Armand shifted, his weight settling fully onto Daniel’s lap, straddling him with an unsettling, possessive ease.
“Please don’t,” Armand murmured, the plea vibrating against Daniel’s lips. “I couldn’t bear it anymore. The distance. Please just stay.”
“I don’t think…” Daniel stammered, his hands coming down to rest uncertainly on Armand’s slender hips, the fine wool soft under his trembling fingers. “I’m confused. I guess we shared a moment here, but… this kind of roleplay is really fucked up.”
“My sweet boy,” Armand murmured, voice thick with a sorrowful, terrifying tenderness. “My stupid, beautiful boy.”
The words, the exact cadence, the possessive ache in them—they didn’t just feel familiar. They felt exhumed. A direct quote from the lost archives of his life.
I didn’t give him the option.
He was a mortal. He could never find me.
She wanted to say yes. But she didn’t trust you.
Was it raining Louis?
A cold clarity washed over Daniel, cutting through the fever-dream of the last few minutes. He looked into the eyes inches from his own.
Eyes he’d looked at this close before during Louis’s brutal questioning about Alice and discarded as nonsense. A trick of his own shattered memory, a hallucination born of stress and sickness. The image of Armand, not quite clear, like pulled out from a dream, saying something. But he’d never talked to Armand before Dubai, he barely ever saw Armand.
In middle school you stole your dad's Playboy magazines. Sold them at recess.
He was losing his mind.
"You weren’t there," Daniel said, shaking his head even as Armand cool hands cradled it and tried to steady him. "You weren’t, except you were— Stop!" Daniel said and with a surge of strength fueled by pure, outraged panic, he pushed up from the sofa.
Armand, caught off balance by the sudden, violent rejection, slipped from his lap. He didn’t fall; much to Daniel’s bitter annoyance, he landed in a graceful, crouching heap on the floor. He looked up at Daniel, not with anger, but with a stunned, wounded shock that was almost childlike.
Daniel stood over him, breathing heavily, his whole right arm trembling.
“Get up,” He said, his voice like gravel. “And start talking. Why didn’t I remember you? At Polynesian Mary's. Why does Louis not remember so much? His brain is as much a big bunch of scrambled eggs as mine and he does not have drugs as an excuse for most of it!"
The question hung in the air, heavier than all the ones about Claudia, about Lestat, about the nature of evil and death.
After a lifetime of dealing with men in crisp shirts who slashed through paragraphs with red pens, he should have been quicker to spot a pattern. He knew the look of a paragraph crossed out, the shape of a narrative, expertly hollowed and filled with something more palatable. The ultimate editor. Everyone around just another manuscript on the block.
Armand rose to his feet with that unsettling, liquid grace. He didn’t retreat. He stepped closer, well into Daniel’s space, and raised a hand. His cool fingers brushed Daniel’s cheek with a tenderness that felt like a violation.
"I’m sorry," Armand said, the apology soft, genuine. "I never can quite help myself. I should have stayed away."
Daniel recoiled from the touch, confusion cutting through his anger. "What are you—"
"I'll try harder." The promise was a whisper. Armand's eyes, fixed on his, were wells of liquid crimson. "Rest."
The word carried a weight, a compulsion that pressed down on Daniel's consciousness like a physical force. His knees buckled. The room swam, the beautiful face in front of him blurring into a smear of gold and red. The last thing he knew was the sensation of strong, cold arms catching him as the world folded itself into a deep, silent, and utterly enforced darkness.