Work Text:
Louis was, in Daniel’s humble and currently furious opinion, taking the fact he’d been brainwashed to forget a major piece of his life far too lightly.
Of course he hadn’t been the one being held as a prisoner and tortured for six days by a fucking psychotic, vicious, completely unstable vampire. Hadn’t been starved for almost a week and played with as a possessed ragdoll, slammed into the nearest wall over and over until he was bleeding the little blood he had left through a dozen fresh wounds. He hadn’t felt his muscles scream and atrophy from straining themselves at unnatural positions for hours on end and had his worst shortcomings, his most private shames and insecurities dragged into the light and poked at until all he wanted was to escape the pain, one way or another.
So yes, he thought he had every right to be fucking angry.
And the casualness, the sheer smothering normality with which everything had continued from the moment they’d remembered, it was driving him insane.
That he was expected to continue the interview, to just accept this, as another part of the madness that surrounded these two.
He continued to lash out, effectively forgetting anything he’d learned the last time. He prodded at Louis’s inadequacies as a companion to Claudia, mocked Armand’s loss of control over the coven, brought up Lestat just to watch the shadows shift in their eyes. The worst part was, they let him. They absorbed his barbs with an infuriating, immovable patience, like he was just an old man having a breakdown and not just very justifiably pissed.
“Mr. Molloy,” Armand said, voice soft, even after Daniel had made a petty remark about Lestat being a mess, but an authentic one, and what was the point of eternity if you couldn’t at least trust your partner to be his own true, terrible self. “You’re distressing yourself.”
“I’m distressing myself?” Daniel repeated, his voice a dry rasp. The fear was there, a cold snake in his chest, but it was drowned in a hotter, purer rage. "Me? Not you, with your unnatural big sad eyes feigning innocence like you’re nothing more than a pawn pushed along by others’ ill-intentions."
His head hurt, now more than ever; the migraines were a permanent feature of the interview now. Images, sensations, sounds he couldn’t completely make out erupted behind his eyelids. The cold slickness of a San Francisco alley wall against his back. The taste of copper and fear. A whisper, too low to decipher, all noise and static.
Daniel winces and clamps his eyes closed, a sharp, pinching pain flaring behind them.
He heard Armand’s voice, but it seemed to come from far away, filtered through the roaring in his ears.
"Louis, perhaps a break is in order."
Daniel forced his eyes open, the world snapping back into a nauseating, too-sharp focus. He saw Louis, his expression a mixture of remorse and confusion. He gave a slight, wary nod, and stood from his chair.
“No,” Daniel ground out, the word thick. He pushed himself upright, ignoring the lingering throb in his skull. "I don’t need to drag this out more than necessary. You want me calm? You want me docile? You picked the wrong reporter for the job."
"This isn’t up for debate," Armand said, slicing through Daniel’s defiance. He followed Louis’s example, rising from his chair. "It’s early already. We’ll continue tomorrow."
“Tomorrow,” Daniel echoed, the word tasting like ash. “Right. Because what’s another day of unraveling in the schedule?” He wanted to fight, to lunge across the desk and shake the pristine composure from Armand’s face. But the throb in his skull had deepened into a sickening pound, and a fresh wave of disorienting images. A glint of streetlight on dark hair, the smell of rain and damp earth, heat pooling at the bottom of his stomach.
Louis had already turned away, his shoulders tense with unspoken conflict. Armand’s gaze remained on Daniel.
“Rashid will see you to your room,” Armand stated.
Daniel stood there, trembling with impotent fury. He felt like a child being sent to bed without supper. He watched Armand turn to follow Louis, the two of them moving with an uncanny synchronicity towards the hallway.
Rashid was there not a half minute later, silent and expectant. The walk back to his room was a humiliating procession. Rashid’s presence a few steps behind him felt less like an escort and more like a warder leading a prisoner back to his cell.
He slammed the room’s door, the solid thud doing nothing to relieve the pressure in his chest. He paced, the plush carpet swallowing the sound of his steps. The fury had no target now, and it curdled into a cold, sickening dread. Tomorrow.
He stopped at the blackened window, pressing his forehead against the cool, impervious glass. His own reflection, a smear of grey hair and tired eyes, stared back.
The thing is, Divisadero wasn’t the only thing Daniel was seeing anymore.
Turns out reliving the torture of '73 had the side effect of pulling off the plug. Flashes and images and sounds, it all started flowing down, blurred, distorted, impossible to sort.
Terror woven through with moments of startling peace. A table scattered with his own notes, a typewriter, cigarettes and a half-empty bottle of gin. His own hand; younger, steadier, but with that familiar tremor of craving as it reached for a syringe. The feel of rubbing his face against soft fabric. Laughter, bright and unburdened, his own, loud and goofy, and the answering vibration of a chest pressed against his back.
At least they weren’t more flashes of a corpse looking at him, unblinking, while he laid paralyzed on the floor. These were different. He could almost recognize some of them. They felt like his. Fragments of his life he thought he’d lost forever to the drugs.
It could be Parkinson's, he reasoned, eating away his brain, but he knew it was not.
Daniel had no idea what to do with any of it.
At this point the problem wasn’t just the flashes themselves; it was what they dragged in with them. Feelings Daniel didn’t know the reason behind but demanded a space in his chest he refused to give them. They pressed in anyway, intrusive and insistent, trying to mingle with his sense of self. They blurred lines he relied on at the moment; what had been done to him and what he was righteously allowed to feel about it.
Anger was his primary emotion, clearly. He understood that, he welcomed it. He was entitled to it. It was the other ones he was having trouble with.
The ones that slipped in around the edges of the fury despite himself. The unwelcome pang of recognition when he saw the isolated stillness in Armand’s eyes. The traitorous softness that rose in him at the memory of the crack in Armand's voice. The unwanted surge of sympathy he felt hearing Louis in those tapes.
This is boring! You're boring! You are so boring!
Colourless. Flavorless. Dull! Dull! Dull nights, dull weeks! Dull months, dull as fuck! Suffocation by the world's softest, beige-est pillow!
The ten hours I spent with that boy were more exciting, more fascinating than decades with you!
Oh, there it is! The half-blank, half-apocalyptic look! But what does it mean tonight, huh? Does he want to lick my boots or chop my hands off? Is it the gremlin or the good nurse tonight? Huh?
‘I'm the vampire Armand and my daddy vampire groomed me into a little bitch.’
In the safety of his room, Daniel flinched. A hot, defensive indignance (completely irrational, entirely unwanted) had flared in him, fierce and protective on Armand’s behalf. The eviseration of your character. The desecration of a person’s deepest wound, shared in a moment of vulnerability, used as a punchline. The sheer, brutal cruelty of it. Daniel didn’t think he could recover from a blow like that from someone he’d loved.
Daniel rubbed his temples, the headache returning. His sympathy was a trap. To feel sorry for Armand was to start excusing him. He found he felt it anyway.
Who would have thought the pimp and the kid being forced into sexual slavery would not make the perfect pairing? The world’s most fucked-up fairy tale.
“I admittedly didn’t know about that part of his history until much later,” The soft, unexpected words made him jump. Armand stood just inside the doorway, his hands clasped behind him.“An uncomfortable coincidence.”
You could call it that.
“Aren’t you supposed to be tucking sleeping prince in?" Daniel’s voice was rough. He gestured vaguely toward the blackened window. "It’s sunny outside.”
“Louis needs his space."
“Oh does he?"
Armand took a single step into the room, his movement hesitant, almost human. “I thought you might need… an apology. “
Daniel stared. “What?”
“In 1973,” Armand began, his gaze fixed on a point just past Daniel’s shoulder. “None of it was your fault. I just wanted to take the pain out on someone. It was wrong. And I’m glad Louis stopped me before…" He trailed off. He finally met Daniel’s eyes. ”I offer you my most sincere apology."
"Yeah, right. If you think this is gonna make me stop trying to dig out whatever the hell else you’re hiding from Louis.”
“No need for any of that,” Armand said, his voice was tired now. “I just want you to feel less troubled. It’s not good for your health."
"What the fuck do you care about my health? Wouldn’t it be better for you if I dropped dead all of a sudden? No more questions, no more barbs, no more book-“
“Don’t say that,” Armand said, the word a crack of sound, sharp as breaking ice. Armand’s composure shattered. “I would never wish for your death, no matter the circumstance.”
The ferocity of the declaration stole Daniel’s breath. And in its wake, the images surged back, unbidden.
His own voice, younger, raw with a different kind of anguish:
You'll torment me forever, won't you, and then you'll watch me die. You'll watch the colors change in my face as I die!
Don’t say that. I would rather die than see you die.
Daniel staggered back a step. The room felt too small, the air suddenly dense. He pressed a hand to his temple, pushing over the ache beneath his palm.
He tried to regain his focus, even as his head pounded. Armand was watching him too closely.
Can’t you see I would trade eternity for you to live only one more day? Do not ask me to be the cause of what I fear most.
I’ll die anyway! With or without you! You would rather bury me than keep me! Fuck you!
“Daniel,” Armand said. He saw him reach a hand towards him and step toward him.
“Don’t come near me,” The words shot out of Daniel, sharp and brittle. Oh, it was Daniel now, was it? He stepped back, his shoulder blades hitting the cold glass of the blackened window.
Armand stood rigid at Daniel’s words. His outstretched hand slowly lowered back to his side. His eyes were wide and dark, and inexplicably panicked.
Please don’t. I couldn’t bear it anymore. The distance. Please just stay.
A fresh wave of disorientation hit him, a vertigo that had nothing to do with the frequent movement of the floor. His heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. For a heartbeat he couldn’t tell which moment he was standing in. The room swam, edges bending, and he was still outside in the living room, surrounded by nothing but Armand.
You can’t know what it’s been like. To stand in the same room as you, having you just a few steps away.
He was a mortal. He could never find me.
I’m sorry. I never can quite help myself.
Kissing, desperate and short and intimate.
His vision cleared, snapping back to the present with a nauseating jolt. The memory slammed into place as if it had never left. The day after the first Paris session.
My sweet boy. My stupid, beautiful boy.
“What more did you take?” Daniel’s voice was flat, dead. “Not just six days in San Francisco.”
Armand was perfectly still; the panic in his eyes had been half replaced for what looked like reluctant acceptance. “No,”.
“No,” Daniel repeated, the word a guttural expulsion of disgust. He knew it already, of course he did, and being lied to would have just been insulting, but the confirmation made rage surge up with renewed force, a familiar, reliable heat. He seized it with relief, let it flood his veins and drown out the tender, more dangerous sensations gathering underneath.
"Daniel." Armand's voice was a whisper, the name a plea and a shield rolled into one fragile sound. "You need to understand."
"Understand what?" The question exploded from Daniel. "That you’re a fucking piece of shit who thinks he can mess with people’s heads to his heart's content? I understand plenty. What I need are facts. What. Did. You. Take?”
Armand’s gaze was unflinching. The plea was gone, something harder attempting to take its place. But beneath it, Daniel saw fear.
"You know what I took."
“I don’t know shit! I get flashes and glitches of things that have absolutely no relation with anything; they could be any day of my life, or they could be dreams I had when I was high." Daniel's voice cracked with frustration. “I’m not gonna ask again."
Armand drew a breath he didn’t need. When he spoke, it was clipped, defensive.
"I took what was necessary to save your life."
"That's your fucking mantra, isn't it? 'I did it for your own good.'" Daniel took a step closer, ignoring the primal fear that screamed at him to back away from the predator. "That might work on Louis. It won’t work on me."
He was close enough now to see the minute, telltale tension around Armand's eyes, the almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw. A fingertip rubbing the same patch of skin of another. The vampire wasn't used to being cornered, not like this.
“Talk."
"It was never my intention," Armand began, finally, his voice low, like the sound was being dragged out of him. ”for you to believe I hated you."
"No." Daniel shook his head. He wasn’t going to fall for this; anything else he was willing to believe, not this. "Don't even try that. Don't you dare.”
"I just wanted you to have a life," Armand insisted, a raw edge creeping into his tone. Daniel took a step back, putting precious distance between himself and the treacherous sound of that voice. "To flourish. To be happy. But you were destroying yourself in a quest to force my hand. I had to. Believe I have never in five hundred years made something more painful than what I did that day.”
"This isn't a game!" Daniel’s voice was a raw scrape of fury. "You don't get to play with that part of my life. I asked for one boundary, and you can’t even respect that. Stay away from her! "
“I am her,” Armand said. “She was the only version of me you could have loved and lived.”
Before Daniel could recoil, could shout, could breathe, Armand closed the distance once again, both hands rising to Daniel’s face. His thumbs brushed the wet tracks of tears Daniel hadn’t even realized were falling.
Daniel felt the touch like a physical blow to the sternum. For a second, the world narrowed to that single, impossible contact.
“Look at me, Daniel,” Armand whispered. His voice a thread of sound, pulling Daniel under. “You know me. From whatever little I left you with. You know the way I look when I lie, the little human tics I still carry, the compulsions I try to quiet but never can completely break off, the shape of all my flaws and idiosyncrasies. I see it in your every thought. You know me better in my absence than most ever do in my presence.” His voice softened, fraying at the edges. “Do you understand now?”
Daniel stared into those huge, tormented eyes, and felt the core of his life collapse. He did know. The recognition was a sickening, unstoppable flood.
He knew the precise, fussy way those thumbs were stroking his cheekbones—a gesture of possessiveness and comfort in equal measure that had once felt like the only solid ground in the world. He knew the slight, almost imperceptible tilt of the head that meant Armand was trying to keep up with his thought process, a mannerism he’d seen on Alice a thousand times over, just had never thought it could be so literal. He knew the strange, vibrating stillness that wasn’t calm, but a ferocious containment of emotion. He knew the love of control that manifested as relentless caretaking. He knew the mercurial shifts from cruel clarity to desperate tenderness.
No, she was— was…
Daniel’s mind reeled. It was insane. It was the only thing that had ever made complete, horrific sense. The puzzle pieces of Alice; her mannerisms, her intensity, her otherness…
He was still staring, shattered, when Armand’s expression shifted. The raw vulnerability vanished, sealed behind a wall of alarm.
“Beloved, are you okay?”
The endearment, her endearment for him, in that voice, was the final twist of the knife.
He felt the floor shift under his feet. This could not be happening.
What was Alice’s eye color again? Daniel had never thought to question himself that. Brown, weren’t they? But his memory supplied Rashid’s eyes— Armand’s eyes. No. Not brown. Amber. A cold sweat broke over his skin. Brown skin. Dark hair. Curly dark hair. Shoulder length. No, shorter. Had it always been like that? Daniel realized, with a lurch of pure panic, that he could not see her face. He scrabbled through the memory of her laugh, her hands, the sound of her voice, but her features were a smudge, an impressionist painting viewed through water.
“Daniel, your heart—” Armand began, taking a half-step back, his face etched with a sudden, alarmed focus.
"Shut up," Daniel whispered, but the command lacked strength. He didn’t feel well. A dizzying vertigo seized him, unrelated to the room. His chest was hurting.
“Rest.” He heard.
And god did he hate that word, was the last thought he had.
…
Consciousness returned in layers: first, the dull, heavy ache in his chest. Then, the tactile reality of a soft surface beneath him. A bed, plush and yielding. He was on his side, curled inwards. His head pillowed not by cotton or down, but by something cool and solid. A faint, rhythmic motion brushed against his temple, through his hair. Fingers. Long, deliberate fingers smoothing back his silvered hair with a steady cadence.
He didn’t need to open his eyes to know. The scent of old paper and fire, of clean sheets and something sharp, the absolute stillness of the air around him, the terrible familiarity of that touch— it mapped directly onto a memory he could now not fully see, but could feel with agonizing precision. Morning rituals. Coming down from a high. The shaky, sweaty dawns of withdrawal. Being tended to.
A quiet shudder passed beneath his skin.
The fingers stilled for a heartbeat, then resumed their gentle, relentless stroke. “Be still,” a voice murmured, it vibrated in the quiet room. “Your heart is steady now. The panic has passed.”
Daniel forced his eyes open. The room was dim, lit only by a single low lamp, casting long, deep shadows. And Armand was still there, propped against the headboard and the pillows, with Daniel’s head cradled in his lap. He was looking down at him, his face a pale, beautiful mask in the gloom, but his eyes were watchful, intent on Daniel’s every breath and tremor.
The feelings of closeness, of affection and belonging crept into his chest like intruders, finding a scarred, lonely part of him that had been craving this exact, impossible thing for four decades.
This was not possible, Daniel repeated to himself. This had to be some weird dream, a fevered hallucination fueled by the med cocktails these assholes had been slipping him. Either that, or the Parkinson’s had gotten to his brain a lot sooner than it was supposed to.
"Shh," Armand intoned. A cool finger pressed gently against his temple. "Perhaps you need a little more sleep."
“Get your hands off me,” Daniel croaked, but the words lacked force, muffled by the fabric of Armand’s trousers and the overwhelming weight of his own exhaustion.
Armand did not remove his hand. Instead, his thumb swept once, slowly, over the pulse point at Daniel’s temple. “No,” he said, the word soft, but final. “Not until I am certain you are well. You are in my care now.”
My care. Ha. It was ridiculous. Daniel almost laughed. A monster, tending to its prey. A prisoner being petted by his captor like a skittish animal. And the most horrifying part was the part of him, old and injured and still desperate, that wanted to roll over and show his belly. Pathetic.
“How long?” His voice was a dry rustle against the fine wool of Armand’s trousers.
“A few hours. The sun has set again.” Armand’s answer was prompt, factual. The caretaker reporting. “Louis is awake. He inquired after you.”
A bitter taste filled Daniel’s mouth. “I bet he did.” He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “What you told him. Everything but the truth, I expect.”
Armand, to his credit, ignored that last bit.
“I told him you were still feeling sully about yesterday. He decided he would give you some space and went to close a deal we have in Egypt.” Armand answered with a chilling simplicity. “This is not his concern. It is between us.”
Us. The word hung in the perfumed air. There was no ‘us’.
The stroking fingers paused.
“You still resist believing it.”
“Believing what?” Daniel snapped, the languid thread of anger giving him a jolt of clarity. “That you are my first wife? That I spent twelve years in a relationship with you? Building a home, a life, with a centuries-old vampire? That you loved me so much you had to brainwash me instead of just saying fuck off like a normal person?”
He heard the words leave his mouth, heard the sheer absurdity of them, coated in a flat, disinterested cadence. Not because he was unaffected, his nerves were singing a frantic, silent aria, but because the volcanic anger he should be feeling was inaccessible. Why wasn’t he furious? He wanted the rage. He needed its clean, clarifying heat to burn away this horrifying closeness. All he had was this numb, weary disbelief, and beneath it, a gravitational pull.
Armand Armand Armand Armand Armand Armand Armand Armand
Like an old obsessive mantra his brain had just rediscovered was the center of his whole existence.
“You’re doing this,” Daniel realized, the words slurred. He had no strength, and honestly, no real want, to get up . “So I can’t get angry.”
“Mmm,” Armand murmured, the sound vibrating through Daniel's skull. A cool finger traced a slow, covetous line over his forehead. “Perhaps. Or perhaps I just want to keep you like this for a little longer.”
"You're deranged," Daniel whispered; it sounded like an old endearment.
"I am allowed to be," Armand replied, his voice dropping to a husk of pure, unvarnished greed. "Thirty-seven years and you’re back in my arms. Where you should be.”
The statement was insanity. It was cruel. It was also a truth so fundamental it felt like coming home after a lifetime of exile. He hated it.
You were born with my fingerprint on your soul. Mine from the very first breath. Mine beyond the last. Entirely. Forever.
It was something a little intense for a barely grown girl to say. But Alice was a raised European, French, cultured, and the words had been catnip to a twenty-five-year-old Daniel.
God, he loved her.
Armand’s voice cut through the blurry memory, cold and precise as a scalpel.
"Can you stop? There is no her. There never was. Alice was the name of our neighbor during 1979. A tedious, perpetually pregnant woman who very much despised the both of us and whose poodle, labelled by you as Alice the mutt, I once compelled to defecate in her handbag after she spilled wine on your drafts for a story. That is likely why you thought I got pregnant at some point and lost the baby. Let me assure you, that never happened. A slip on my part, to use that name. An unfortunate psychic association."
He said it all with the detached air of an archivist correcting a cataloguing error.
Alice.
The fucking bitch.
Images came in backlash, a woman with a sharp, slavic cast to her features; a brow oddly split, half blonde, half white; a swollen belly that suggested a fourth pregnancy in as many years. Always sneering. Always armed with small, mean comments. The smell of sour milk and cigarettes following everywhere she went.
The brutal reframing felt like a betrayal, it took the name of his most profound love and revealed it as a cheap prop, a name picked at random, with an unfortunate association.
The numbness shattered.
A raw, wounded sound escaped Daniel’s throat—not a sob, but a gasp of pure psychic pain. He jerked upright, scrambling off the bed with graceless, frantic energy. He stood panting, staring at the creature on the bed who looked at him with expectant eyes.
“You don’t get to do that,” Daniel rasped, his voice trembling with a fury that was finally, blessedly, his own. “You don’t get to take the most beautiful thing I've ever felt and tell me it was named after a fucking poodle.”
Armand tilted his head. “I am not telling you it was not beautiful. I am telling you it was real. I was real. Our love was real. The name was… regrettable. Does the label on the bottle change the content?”
“Yes!” Daniel shouted, the word tearing from him. “It changes everything! You are telling me most of my life I’ve been obsessed with a woman that didn’t even exist.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
Armand rose from the bed in one fluid, unsettling motion. He didn’t approach, but his presence seemed to fill the room, dark and oppressive.
“But I exist. I, who spend endless nights pulling you back from the precipice when your hunger for drugs became greater than your will to live. I, who cleaned the sickness from you, who held you through the tremors, who kissed your brow even as you cursed me and told me the meanest things that would come to your mind. As you used my love as a weapon to hurt me in the deepest way possible. I, who made sure you did not vanish into the gutter or a morgue as your foolish obsession with a story led you into the jaws of wolves.”
He took a single, silent step forward. The dim light carved his face into a mask of tragic severity. “When I left— when I was forced to choose between my presence and your life, I had to ensure you would live. So I removed the source of the infection. Me. And replaced it with a mortal-shaped scar named Alice. I took the memories that anchored you to me. The ones that would have made you hunt a shadow until it consumed you. I gave you a clean grief. A human heartbreak to explain the pain. A reason you could understand, and thus, survive.”
His voice softened, not with tenderness, but with the grim satisfaction of a proven point. “And it worked. You lived. You thrived.”
“You don’t get to decide what kind of pain I can survive! A clean grief?" Daniel laughed, a sharp, broken sound. "You call this clean? This hollowed-out, forty-year ghost? You didn't give me grief. You gave me a phantom limb that never stops aching."
“I gave you a life!” The words burst from Armand, sharp with a frustration that seemed to surprise even him. “A good one!”
“Good?” Daniel’s laugh was a bark of pure, unvarnished agony. “Is good risking your life cause you couldn’t care less if you died? Hoping the person who was supposed to love you beyond anything would at least deign to show up at the funeral, say a proper goodbye one last time, instead of just dropping you at rehab and disappearing into the fucking ether?”
He was advancing now, each step a punctuation mark of his pain. “Searching for a substitute with frantic panic half-expecting her to drop at the wedding and tell you what a piece of shit you are?” His voice cracked. ”Losing every major event in your kids’ lives, being a shit father whose daughters barely give him the time of the day? Relapsing time and time again, getting drunk off your ass at 10 am, cheating on the mother of your kids so many times you can’t even count?”
He ran a shaking hand through his hair, his breath coming in ragged pulls. The fight left him as suddenly as it came, leaving only a crushing weariness. He looked at Armand, his arms spread in a gesture of total, devastating surrender.
“As you can see I’m hardly the picture of senior contentment you seem so proud of engineering.”
“Would you have preferred the alternative? For a life of barely three decades, body failing, mind unraveling, forever bound to a monster? Is that better?”
“It would have been mine!” Daniel’s chest heaved. “My choices. My life.”
“You’re clinging to the past because your mind refuses the present.”
Daniel shook his head, a slow, defeated motion. The anger was still there, but it was cooling into a hard, clear certainty. “No,” he said, his voice quieter now, firm. “I’m clinging to the fact that I deserved the truth. However terrible. However messy. However fucking monstrous. I deserved to know who I was loving. I deserved to choose.” He met Armand’s gaze, his own eyes red-rimmed but steady.
He pushed away, his legs shaky but holding. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go… grieve for a poodle.” The sarcasm was a weak weapon, but it was all he had left. He turned toward the door, not knowing where he would go, only knowing he had to get out of this room.