Like some undersea creature, cast up into colorful stars. Armand's beauty is unsettling even in ordinary times, persisting even when Daniel sees past it. Now it appears to be some unhinged thing, a force of nature in itself, and it's terrible in a way. But still beautiful.
(Maybe Daniel should have said May I.)
"Anywhere you want."
Daniel offers his hands to his maker, allowing him to guide them wherever. Hopefully not into, you know, an incinerator or something, but he's not actually worried. High enough to be enjoying himself and be seeing into other dimensions, but not high enough to be totally lost. Still keeping half a foot into the real world to maintain focus on Armand, in case he takes a bad turn.
Armand winds his hands around Daniel's, flows to his feet, pulling him along. Anywhere you want feels like a promise, like he truly could go anywhere. The old palazzos of Venice, ancient even then, or sunny narrow alleyways where the sound of voices clatters off the stone and the sun makes warm the puddles and he doesn't entirely remember when or where he has that memory, or the ocean, which wouldn't kill them, but get out far enough, deep enough, and there would be little they could do but be held by it.
(Oh, starvation? Vampires don't die of starvation, not really, perhaps not even the young ones. Feed their brittle corpses with enough blood—)
Not the theatre. It was good that Louis burned it. Everyone always does what his heart desires, until they don't.
These thoughts, sparking between stars, and he thinks he would prefer his imagined ocean than anything he remembers. But between fantasy and memory, there is reality, the present, and he finds he has led Daniel to the floor, merely a room away. "I want to be here," he explains, his hands now reaching for Daniel's face. "I want you to touch me."
The study, the floor, hardwood with a complementary rug that goes well with the color of the grain and the color of the ceiling, which is darker in here than the living room. Daniel gets down there with him, no pain in his knees there beside Armand. He wonders if he just needed to move, or if he needed to get away from the corpse; his maker is wildly idiosyncratic sometimes. (Most times.)
"All right."
Daniel turns his head enough to press a kiss to one of Armand's thumbs.
"Here. Me and you."
He keeps one hand grounded on Armand, stays where he is just next to him, and then reaches with his other. Reaches down to his feet. Starts there, touching his toes, stroking over them and the flat tops of his feet, pressing lightly on the tendons there and sliding up, careful. He watches Armand's face as he does this, waiting to see if this is actually too weird and maybe he meant a hand job.
He'd thought of sex, probably, in a general sense if not a specific act. Still a part of him that anticipates this desire in others, lessons learned young, reinforced over and over and over. The odd distance that had settled between himself and Louis, at times, broken by sex. And he likes it, fucking, so it's not exactly a burden, meeting need with need, want with want.
But Daniel touches his feet, keeps a hand on him, both of them half-huddled on the rug, and Armand has to remember the long moments they've spent touching that had little to do with any of that, even if it becomes it, or comes after. Laying against Daniel, fingers playing where his hair gets finer at the base of his neck.
And now this. He watches Daniel's hands with hooded eyes, head tipped. Not weird, not too weird. He thinks he can feel every fine little mammalian hair reach up to greet him. Electric.
Shifts a leg, encouraging that journey, after a glance of assent.
Armand is the deep whorls of his charcoal drawings. Slopes of his ankles, indents, the hard line of his shin. Daniel's grounding hand stays where it is, occasionally flexing and petting against Armand's side, while the other slides up. A little look, once, gently teasing, like— should he check the other side, too? Both feet?
Which would be fine. There's no hardship to touching him, mapping him out, his fingers with careful claws finding bare skin and clothed flesh alike. He slips his touch under the hem of his trousers, but doesn't push anything up, because Armand is just as pleasant to feel that way, too. Kneecaps, the little divots where everything connects, tendons that rarely get any attention unless you bump into something. He wishes Armand wouldn't toss all the drawings he doesn't love instantly. Daniel loves them all instantly.
"Sometimes I think of you like a plant," Daniel tells him, even though this is something he had planned on not telling him, on grounds it's stupid. But the drugs have decided otherwise.
It's relaxing. Absorbing. He can feel parts of himself unwind rather than tense up, which, he thinks, might be his more natural response. Not always like a flinch. Sometimes, it's to go as still as possible, so as not to discourage/encourage. Sometimes it's the slow winding up of something pleasant. This is how it is, under someone else's hands.
Not Daniel's, not always. Here, he can relax. He has to. No ability to wind through his brain, to monitor very much at all except for what he can observe the usual way.
Draws his focus up at this. Expression opening, amused. "How am I like a plant," Armand invites. There are a lot of plants with many different temperaments. Maybe he will teach Daniel this. But, for now—
Daniel is paying attention to the backs of Armand's knees, now. A sensitive, easily overlooked area; he traces shapes through fabric, thinks about biting him there. Wonders if Armand would let him. It'd be a funny spot to ask for, first thing. Not his wrist, not his throat. Your knee pit, could I?
Everything is dreamy and beautiful. The paint on the ceiling has floated down to blanket them in violet and gold.
He looks up. Daniel's expression turns sheepish, a little half-smile, expressing that he feels silly about what he's going to say.
"Bear with me," he requests. Sliding his touch over a calf, seeing if Armand wants to extend a leg, or keep it propped up. This might be sensual, but it isn't really sexual. Just touching him, because they're both here, real, now. "Plants hibernate. Some of them. Sometimes all they are is just a seed in the ground all winter. Or they go dormant for years, or they're just something people think is inert, like... when everybody went nuts for tulips and were buying and selling their bulbs, passing around these rock-like things. Tulip Mania. Maybe you were there."
It was in the 1600s. Maybe he was. Daniel has a hand on a thigh, now, but his touch remains slow, not aiming anywhere saucy.
"And you might think, plants need the sun, nobody like us can be like a plant. But you hibernated away from the sun, and now you can see it again. You say, sometimes, you're not sure if we should exist, and you don't feel like you're a part of the world. But I think you're like a plant." He's said this already. Look. Go with him. "Because you were hibernating. And who knows the world better than you, now? Someone that's been a part of it for so long? Who else would understand the way it's changed, the ways it could be healed? I just.. think it's beautiful."
Biddable under coaxing hands, Armand stretching out that leg, angled to rest it against Daniel's. It feels like affirmation, these wandering fingers, in time with the things Daniel is saying. Armand is, in fact, present, and he is, in fact, rooted in his own body, not just some revenant thing ambulating himself for no particular purpose, taken apart, roughly thrown back together.
"I like plants," and he doesn't remember if he said that or just thought it, when Daniel had challenged him that one time, if there was anything real in him at all. Challenged him to think about it, at least, if not the notion itself.
He is watching Daniel's hands, which he also likes, and the world which is an odd rendering of layered cellophane layers aglow has skewed rosy, and that's because his eyes are wet. Which so rarely happens. Looks back at up Daniel's face, a flutter of a blink.
Says, "I think you will be disappointed," and that sentence was more full, but ends there.
There's a nerve that runs along the outside side of the thigh. Daniel had a pinched one, in his forties. He presses his fingers along where it would be, in Armand. Who likes plants. Daniel smiles a little to himself; he knows that, he thinks. He remembers his tree and its unfortunate, symbolic immolation. He wonders if his maker would like to do any gardening here.
"It's not that kind of a thought." Still touching him. He sees painted stars, even though there aren't any on the ceiling, drift down to illuminate them here on the floor. "It doesn't come with any expectations. You just are, and that's what I think."
Finally, Daniel glances up, and sees Armand's face.
He wishes he had some endearment for him. He can't think of any that wouldn't sound patronizing, though. Babe? Honey? Boss? The free hand that's been used just for grounding slides up a bit, settling over the center of his chest.
In case this is in question. Daniel is being attentive, and they've done this kind of thing before, and so Armand understands their roles. He might even say that doing this, sharing these experiences, entering these theatres that Daniel knows better than Armand, is almost worth doing for the purpose of being led along through them, as well as for the experience itself. For Daniel to look up and see him and put a hand on him and tell him where they are.
He is alright. They're right here, still. Daniel, who sees him as something like no one has described him as before, like something alive, whose out-of-placeness is a beautiful thing. Of course, there's the impulse to argue. Daniel will be disappointed, it's only a matter of time, unless he is different, and Armand wouldn't have made him if he wasn't different.
Like with the corpse they left behind, there are shapes sprouting out from the rug, but these don't have him recoil. Watches as they curl around them, like they are still in a thick garden of wild flowers.
"I remember not really understanding that the world could change." Now with Daniel's hand wandered up further, he can touch at this contact, a trailing of fingertips across the back of his hand, to his wrist. "I didn't consider that the world was round and that it existed in a greater space or spun in circles. I didn't relate the way that I could learn things, that humanity could also learn things. I thought I was joining in with a song already written. I didn't know there was more to discover and imagine than already had been. And then I was immortal."
Up to Daniel's elbow, feeling towards the tender skin inside of it, slipping beneath his sleeve. "And a hundred years pass. Two hundred. You wish you could go back. It's too much, too fast. I think it's why the Children embraced the dark underground the way they did, but it doesn't work. We still need the blood. We'll always still drink of the world."
A creature sprawled on his floor, touching him, being touched. A creature that Daniel resembles more and more each day; they are the same kind of monster. Armand, taken too soon. Daniel, probably not soon enough. Carrying opposite ends of the same troubled rope.
Tied together with it.
But free, here. In colors, and paints, and growing things.
"You never got to rest." Daniel lets Armand's fingers climb his arm. He turns it gently, whenever it's helpful to that questing touch. Rest. What a word, like a bell. "The current pulled you along so quickly."
A hand on Armand's chest, the other resting light against his belly. They are connected. All the time, connected, a silver thread. He wonders if Armand feels like he can put his feet in the water and watch, now, or if he always feels like he might drown. Daniel wants to hold his hand and make sure he doesn't get swept away.
"Everything that lives in this world takes something. You know that." Daniel walks fingers across his soft middle. "Vampires and plants. I know it isn't simple. But it could be, for a few minutes."
The invisible and completely unbreakable string that connects them as beings. Armand's hand has settled on Daniel's arm, fingers hidden in his sleeve. Some urge in him that wants that closeness, to be inside of him, which could be sex but isn't right now, more like a desire to occupy the exact same space in the world, behind his ribcage, beneath his skin.
That would be like drowning. Armand is conscious of his breath from the way Daniel's hands are on him, and does so slowly, with consideration.
"That would be nice," he confesses. The constant tightrope walk between survival at all costs and an annihilation, a floor that gets lower and lower, vanishing away from him, with every passing second. He could just be a plant for a while. Grounded.
He pushes Daniel. Gently, ish. The aim is to lay against him amongst the grasses and flowers.
Gently, ish, Daniel goes. He lays down on his side next to Armand, careful to go slowly so he doesn't disturb the colors cradling them, and so that Armand's fingers inching up his sleeve aren't dislodged. Flowers grow around them, mingling with painted stars.
"I like being here with you."
A confession for a confession.
He means the broad spectrum: Armand's fleeting visits, his presence in the house, the times he stays in his own room, the times he crawls into bed with Daniel. This past week, carving it out just for the two of them, fooling around and sinking into each other. Right now, on the floor, in the grasses and flowers, making shapes in charcoal and the sky.
It's always true, but it feels especially obvious tonight. They're supposed to be tied together.
Armand can imagine the multitude of complicated feelings and thoughts that this confession might induce, but presently, he is a plant. Moss, perhaps, or a creeping vine. He can feel this transformation like a tickling across his skin, like little feathery offshoots are pushing past his nails and curling up towards Daniel's bicep.
Sort of feels like drawing. Maybe later.
He is told, I like being here with you, and accepts it in its simplicity. "I like that I can," he offers back. That he is welcome. A bed, a room. Art supplies. A cat who steals his slippers in such a way that it feels flattering.
Plants, and stars. Part of each other, part of the world. The same ecosystem of roots and vines; they have the same heartbeat, and so it only follows that they would be the same botanical entity, too. A sharp, earthy scent, like eucalyptus, or mint. Fresh dirt, wet paint, refreshing cold air, the soft dust of flower petals.
Daniel smiles. It makes his face do funny things, because he's already got so many deep-carved lines. His eyes disappear with it, but the impression of the look in them is sincere and sparkling, because what else is there in the whole of the Earth that he might like to hear?
Existence is a fucking mystery. No one will ever know he meaning of life. There isn't one. But Armand likes that he made him, and Daniel likes that Armand is his maker. What a luxury, to have one puzzle piece to hold and guard like the precious thing it is.
He still has places to touch him. Slowly, he continues, angled against his maker. Vines will stitch them together.
He can entertain this hallucinations for a while. They are more sensory than visual, as if his nervous system were given the ability to sprout beyond his skin and gently feel the world around him. Like he can feel the fine muscles in Daniel's face flex along with a smile, intuit the unconscious prompts that formed it. Connect it to the thing he said.
Remembers what it felt like, to be in terrible possession of Daniel's body, of at least some of his mind. Of course, overwhelming humans in that way is nothing new, was nothing new, but had he ever indulged in cruelty that way before? He doesn't think so.
Feels it now, a little, that sense of entangled physiology, except he can no more exert his will than he can convince his own pain receptors to fire or go numb.
"I like drawing you," after a moment of drifting, of feeling Daniel touching him.
He can feel Armand's pulse, where he touches him. It's the same as his own. They are one entity now, like trees whose roots mingle together and combine into the same system. A single heart cleaved in two. It makes him wonder about how long Armand waited to create another vampire, and if he was lonely before. He had been disgusted by it, sure, but Daniel's been disgusted by plenty of things that he's liked. Doesn't have to make sense.
But it does, somehow, right now. Most things do make sense when you're high as fuck on mind-expanding mushrooms, Daniel notes with some measure of serene satisfaction. Just kinda nice.
"I like it when you do." A thumb, over a pulse point. "I like when you draw anything, actually. It's nice having you there, when we're both doing something. Listening to the way you move a pencil or a charcoal over a surface. Or when I come back and find something you've done, that you're working on."
It feels like an artist's rendering, the way Daniel talks about it. The peculiar sense of being the subject of someone else's regard. Being made real that way.
A selfish reason to feed someone the gift, maybe, but an unchanging reality, and they are trading words about the things they like, and Armand has already confessed to liking it. To doing this selfish thing, and the results thereof. He could say something about Sartre, his definitional suppositions of love, but he would rather not. That comes after the mind-expanding mushrooms, not during.
"Drawing you isn't drawing anything," he says. Shifting so that as they lay against each other, they can see each other, and it immediately feels like an application of gravity. Less drifting. This is fine. Armand sketches his fingertips along Daniel's jaw, his chin. Studying him here, at this close range. "Drawing anything is practice."
Like if he can capture the way the light hits the bend of a leaf of a potted plant, he can replicate this skill then depicting the glow of light through the thinner part of Daniel's ear.
Daniel feels himself adjust to Armand's shift, like a flower tilting into sunlight. (The opposite. Beautiful for it. Dark and deep past what he ever thought was dark before. A velvet so dark it becomes its own kind of luminous.) He feels like they're nestled on a down, or one of those water beds everyone loved for five minutes. The hardwood floor, the soft rug, immaterial.
"What's different about drawing me?"
Could be a self-important question. But the light tone of his voice, the curious crinkle of his brow, exposes a laughable innocence. He definitely does not understand the appeal of himself as a subject— though he does like it, very much, because he enjoys the way Armand's gaze slides over him, like a soft, liquid thing; he enjoys the fact that Armand is obligated to sit in the same room with him, and let him hear his small thoughtful sounds and light scrapes and scribbles, his sighs, his occasional deviations to pet the cat.
(Hopefully the cat will not start eating their guest. Like it's fine if so, but.)
(The cat will go for all the soft tissue first. Not pretty.)
Armand has insisted on this turn of conversation, he knows, but still acknowledges the beat of self-consciousness in himself. Daniel, as flippant and sarcastic and deflective as anyone Armand has met, and so maybe it's justified, some fear of verbalising the vulnerable for what will become of it after. Laughed at, ignored, dismissed.
But it hasn't really been that way, particularly not when Daniel settles on asking him a question. So, alright. He considers the answer, the usual suspects of why a person may find an older man attractive. Age as virtue, as signs of experience, as authority and frailty in one thing, and isn't all that true anyway? Puts it aside, opens his mouth to speak.
"Because you're handsome," he says. "Because I like the way you're put together. I like your body and the way you move it. Even when you were mortal, ailing, you seemed strong to me beneath it. I liked to watch your hands when they weren't trembling. I like it even more now that I've made you stronger."
He can imagine this litany being a little unbearable. He hopes so. Words beneath the skin. "I like that you've been turned at the age that you are. I'm bored of the ones turned young, kept that way, of youth like that. I don't think I could touch one and feel something, anymore."
They were talking about drawing. But also not. Also talking of preservation. Of having. Still, to answer the question, "I want to show you. The things I see."
What does he expect? Something about studying Daniel like a bug in a jar. Scientific diagrams. Something strange and otherworldly, a screwed up aspect of their connection that Armand indulges in and Daniel enjoys. That it could be as simple as Armand liking how he looks stuns him, for some reason. He has thought that Armand finds him at least not intolerable-looking, but figured it was a little bit 'fucked up kink' and mostly 'despite', when it came to sexual attraction.
Maybe it is some of that still. I'm bored of the ones turned young, that's very Armand-specific, fixing him in this place that Armand likes, keeping him for himself. But does Daniel mind? ... Not really. Not as much as he should.
And it isn't that he thinks of himself as ugly. He was always alright, he figured. He got by. But looking the way he does now, the full physical manifestation of his age, is not attractive. He's come to terms with it, has had decades to come to terms with it in realtime, every change happening outside of his own control, his health slipping out of his hands along with everything else. Maybe, if they were sober, he'd feel a flutter and huff about it, because a few pretty words can't undo all the scaffolding he's built to cope with aging.
But they aren't sober. Armand's words are perfectly sincere, and they undo some little knot in Daniel, and begin to stitch something else.
Still. He looks positively shy, hearing all that. It is unbearable, in its way.
"No one's ever... I mean, even when I was younger, and looked alright." Fumbling. Like he's still the kid he's referring to. "Did you know, you have this ability to make me feel things that are completely new."
How charming, that Daniel fumbles in the wake of these words. How pleased with himself Armand will permit himself to feel, and also show that he feels so. Any sharpness to it, the way some of their banter can have a little edge, softens at the second part.
"We've run quite the gamut," he says. "Of feelings."
He shifts. Folds an arm on Daniel's chest, rests his head there. A habit for liking being on top, in the most basic sense of the premise. "There's a school of thought about mood. And beauty. Where it is located, the relationship between the feelings of a person, the thing they have a feeling towards. The existentialist says that these moods are the subjective lens through which we view the world, rendering it real that way.
"I find it compelling." The patch of carpet he is watching is rippling, warping. Swimming creatures beneath. He extends a hand, touches the pile. His senses contradict the vision. It's pleasing. "A world that is empty of mood and beauty and love until someone deigns to perceive it that way. Objects, people, places. Compelling but not convincing. I think beauty has locations. Manifestations. I think feelings can be transmitted."
Stops short of reflecting on God, His part in it all. Easy to do. All of it buried.
A weighted blanket, shaped like Armand. It still feels like they're floating, he thinks; on a barely-swaying hammock, made of all the plants that they've become. He raises his head enough to press a kiss to his maker's forehead, because he is a nightmarish monster, and he is precious to Daniel. He makes him feel. He makes him feel everything.
His head drops back, and he slides one hand up and down Armand's spine, slow and rhythmic. He thinks he can feel all the charcoal he draws with. He wonders if Armand will draw anything he remembers from this trip. If Daniel looks different here. If they've transformed.
"Like how we don't really know what anything looks like," he supposes. "Just light bouncing off things, and... imaginary colors, like magenta." Daniel wrinkles his nose. "Is it magenta?"
Maybe it's cyan. Armand's the artist, not him.
"Beauty probably does have locations." Like wherever Armand happens to be. Very good paintings. Perfect sunsets. "What are you transmitting, right now?"
Thinking about the existentialists he has evoked and quantum physics, whether their emergences betray some overlap, but narrowly avoids launching into a ramble down this path. Mostly, Armand makes note to himself to look up some books, and otherwise—
Considers the question. Imagines the way they are tangled together, physical limbs and his own strange impression of clinging vines, growing roots. He doesn't know too much about the vampire bond, such as it is, but he knows that what he experiences of it, what he thinks he experiences of it, is unlike anything he has heard. Maybe they just don't speak of it; he wouldn't. Or maybe it's different.
He winds around that shivering, metal thread that exists between them, that sometimes he thinks he can feel even better when they are physically apart, but can feel it now anyway. Pulls against it. The sense of Daniel bound to him, forever. The sense of Daniel belonging to him.
A shivery breath in. They can't read each other's minds, but they can feel each other. Daniel knows it. There's no uncertainty now, in this space where he understands the universe. He feels Armand, he feels this thing that binds them, a metaphysical body part existing in two beings at once. He feels the pull, and he likes it. Curls his presence around it, lets himself be pulled deeper, and knows it's stitching them ever closer.
Maybe that's why the sex is so good. Less about sex (though, a lot about sex, still), more about the sledgehammer complement to this beautiful thread.
Daniel winds his arms around Armand. A sense of possession, a sense of wanting to be possessed. This monster made him. Armand looked into him and saw that he had accidentally been born a person, and fixed him. By making him a monster, too.
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no subject
(Maybe Daniel should have said May I.)
"Anywhere you want."
Daniel offers his hands to his maker, allowing him to guide them wherever. Hopefully not into, you know, an incinerator or something, but he's not actually worried. High enough to be enjoying himself and be seeing into other dimensions, but not high enough to be totally lost. Still keeping half a foot into the real world to maintain focus on Armand, in case he takes a bad turn.
no subject
(Oh, starvation? Vampires don't die of starvation, not really, perhaps not even the young ones. Feed their brittle corpses with enough blood—)
Not the theatre. It was good that Louis burned it. Everyone always does what his heart desires, until they don't.
These thoughts, sparking between stars, and he thinks he would prefer his imagined ocean than anything he remembers. But between fantasy and memory, there is reality, the present, and he finds he has led Daniel to the floor, merely a room away. "I want to be here," he explains, his hands now reaching for Daniel's face. "I want you to touch me."
no subject
"All right."
Daniel turns his head enough to press a kiss to one of Armand's thumbs.
"Here. Me and you."
He keeps one hand grounded on Armand, stays where he is just next to him, and then reaches with his other. Reaches down to his feet. Starts there, touching his toes, stroking over them and the flat tops of his feet, pressing lightly on the tendons there and sliding up, careful. He watches Armand's face as he does this, waiting to see if this is actually too weird and maybe he meant a hand job.
no subject
But Daniel touches his feet, keeps a hand on him, both of them half-huddled on the rug, and Armand has to remember the long moments they've spent touching that had little to do with any of that, even if it becomes it, or comes after. Laying against Daniel, fingers playing where his hair gets finer at the base of his neck.
And now this. He watches Daniel's hands with hooded eyes, head tipped. Not weird, not too weird. He thinks he can feel every fine little mammalian hair reach up to greet him. Electric.
Shifts a leg, encouraging that journey, after a glance of assent.
no subject
Which would be fine. There's no hardship to touching him, mapping him out, his fingers with careful claws finding bare skin and clothed flesh alike. He slips his touch under the hem of his trousers, but doesn't push anything up, because Armand is just as pleasant to feel that way, too. Kneecaps, the little divots where everything connects, tendons that rarely get any attention unless you bump into something. He wishes Armand wouldn't toss all the drawings he doesn't love instantly. Daniel loves them all instantly.
"Sometimes I think of you like a plant," Daniel tells him, even though this is something he had planned on not telling him, on grounds it's stupid. But the drugs have decided otherwise.
no subject
Not Daniel's, not always. Here, he can relax. He has to. No ability to wind through his brain, to monitor very much at all except for what he can observe the usual way.
Draws his focus up at this. Expression opening, amused. "How am I like a plant," Armand invites. There are a lot of plants with many different temperaments. Maybe he will teach Daniel this. But, for now—
no subject
Everything is dreamy and beautiful. The paint on the ceiling has floated down to blanket them in violet and gold.
He looks up. Daniel's expression turns sheepish, a little half-smile, expressing that he feels silly about what he's going to say.
"Bear with me," he requests. Sliding his touch over a calf, seeing if Armand wants to extend a leg, or keep it propped up. This might be sensual, but it isn't really sexual. Just touching him, because they're both here, real, now. "Plants hibernate. Some of them. Sometimes all they are is just a seed in the ground all winter. Or they go dormant for years, or they're just something people think is inert, like... when everybody went nuts for tulips and were buying and selling their bulbs, passing around these rock-like things. Tulip Mania. Maybe you were there."
It was in the 1600s. Maybe he was. Daniel has a hand on a thigh, now, but his touch remains slow, not aiming anywhere saucy.
"And you might think, plants need the sun, nobody like us can be like a plant. But you hibernated away from the sun, and now you can see it again. You say, sometimes, you're not sure if we should exist, and you don't feel like you're a part of the world. But I think you're like a plant." He's said this already. Look. Go with him. "Because you were hibernating. And who knows the world better than you, now? Someone that's been a part of it for so long? Who else would understand the way it's changed, the ways it could be healed? I just.. think it's beautiful."
no subject
"I like plants," and he doesn't remember if he said that or just thought it, when Daniel had challenged him that one time, if there was anything real in him at all. Challenged him to think about it, at least, if not the notion itself.
He is watching Daniel's hands, which he also likes, and the world which is an odd rendering of layered cellophane layers aglow has skewed rosy, and that's because his eyes are wet. Which so rarely happens. Looks back at up Daniel's face, a flutter of a blink.
Says, "I think you will be disappointed," and that sentence was more full, but ends there.
no subject
"It's not that kind of a thought." Still touching him. He sees painted stars, even though there aren't any on the ceiling, drift down to illuminate them here on the floor. "It doesn't come with any expectations. You just are, and that's what I think."
Finally, Daniel glances up, and sees Armand's face.
He wishes he had some endearment for him. He can't think of any that wouldn't sound patronizing, though. Babe? Honey? Boss? The free hand that's been used just for grounding slides up a bit, settling over the center of his chest.
"We're still right here."
no subject
In case this is in question. Daniel is being attentive, and they've done this kind of thing before, and so Armand understands their roles. He might even say that doing this, sharing these experiences, entering these theatres that Daniel knows better than Armand, is almost worth doing for the purpose of being led along through them, as well as for the experience itself. For Daniel to look up and see him and put a hand on him and tell him where they are.
He is alright. They're right here, still. Daniel, who sees him as something like no one has described him as before, like something alive, whose out-of-placeness is a beautiful thing. Of course, there's the impulse to argue. Daniel will be disappointed, it's only a matter of time, unless he is different, and Armand wouldn't have made him if he wasn't different.
Like with the corpse they left behind, there are shapes sprouting out from the rug, but these don't have him recoil. Watches as they curl around them, like they are still in a thick garden of wild flowers.
"I remember not really understanding that the world could change." Now with Daniel's hand wandered up further, he can touch at this contact, a trailing of fingertips across the back of his hand, to his wrist. "I didn't consider that the world was round and that it existed in a greater space or spun in circles. I didn't relate the way that I could learn things, that humanity could also learn things. I thought I was joining in with a song already written. I didn't know there was more to discover and imagine than already had been. And then I was immortal."
Up to Daniel's elbow, feeling towards the tender skin inside of it, slipping beneath his sleeve. "And a hundred years pass. Two hundred. You wish you could go back. It's too much, too fast. I think it's why the Children embraced the dark underground the way they did, but it doesn't work. We still need the blood. We'll always still drink of the world."
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Tied together with it.
But free, here. In colors, and paints, and growing things.
"You never got to rest." Daniel lets Armand's fingers climb his arm. He turns it gently, whenever it's helpful to that questing touch. Rest. What a word, like a bell. "The current pulled you along so quickly."
A hand on Armand's chest, the other resting light against his belly. They are connected. All the time, connected, a silver thread. He wonders if Armand feels like he can put his feet in the water and watch, now, or if he always feels like he might drown. Daniel wants to hold his hand and make sure he doesn't get swept away.
"Everything that lives in this world takes something. You know that." Daniel walks fingers across his soft middle. "Vampires and plants. I know it isn't simple. But it could be, for a few minutes."
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That would be like drowning. Armand is conscious of his breath from the way Daniel's hands are on him, and does so slowly, with consideration.
"That would be nice," he confesses. The constant tightrope walk between survival at all costs and an annihilation, a floor that gets lower and lower, vanishing away from him, with every passing second. He could just be a plant for a while. Grounded.
He pushes Daniel. Gently, ish. The aim is to lay against him amongst the grasses and flowers.
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"I like being here with you."
A confession for a confession.
He means the broad spectrum: Armand's fleeting visits, his presence in the house, the times he stays in his own room, the times he crawls into bed with Daniel. This past week, carving it out just for the two of them, fooling around and sinking into each other. Right now, on the floor, in the grasses and flowers, making shapes in charcoal and the sky.
It's always true, but it feels especially obvious tonight. They're supposed to be tied together.
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Sort of feels like drawing. Maybe later.
He is told, I like being here with you, and accepts it in its simplicity. "I like that I can," he offers back. That he is welcome. A bed, a room. Art supplies. A cat who steals his slippers in such a way that it feels flattering.
"I like that I made you," for free.
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Daniel smiles. It makes his face do funny things, because he's already got so many deep-carved lines. His eyes disappear with it, but the impression of the look in them is sincere and sparkling, because what else is there in the whole of the Earth that he might like to hear?
Existence is a fucking mystery. No one will ever know he meaning of life. There isn't one. But Armand likes that he made him, and Daniel likes that Armand is his maker. What a luxury, to have one puzzle piece to hold and guard like the precious thing it is.
He still has places to touch him. Slowly, he continues, angled against his maker. Vines will stitch them together.
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Remembers what it felt like, to be in terrible possession of Daniel's body, of at least some of his mind. Of course, overwhelming humans in that way is nothing new, was nothing new, but had he ever indulged in cruelty that way before? He doesn't think so.
Feels it now, a little, that sense of entangled physiology, except he can no more exert his will than he can convince his own pain receptors to fire or go numb.
"I like drawing you," after a moment of drifting, of feeling Daniel touching him.
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But it does, somehow, right now. Most things do make sense when you're high as fuck on mind-expanding mushrooms, Daniel notes with some measure of serene satisfaction. Just kinda nice.
"I like it when you do." A thumb, over a pulse point. "I like when you draw anything, actually. It's nice having you there, when we're both doing something. Listening to the way you move a pencil or a charcoal over a surface. Or when I come back and find something you've done, that you're working on."
Alone, together, he just likes that Armand draws.
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A selfish reason to feed someone the gift, maybe, but an unchanging reality, and they are trading words about the things they like, and Armand has already confessed to liking it. To doing this selfish thing, and the results thereof. He could say something about Sartre, his definitional suppositions of love, but he would rather not. That comes after the mind-expanding mushrooms, not during.
"Drawing you isn't drawing anything," he says. Shifting so that as they lay against each other, they can see each other, and it immediately feels like an application of gravity. Less drifting. This is fine. Armand sketches his fingertips along Daniel's jaw, his chin. Studying him here, at this close range. "Drawing anything is practice."
Like if he can capture the way the light hits the bend of a leaf of a potted plant, he can replicate this skill then depicting the glow of light through the thinner part of Daniel's ear.
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"What's different about drawing me?"
Could be a self-important question. But the light tone of his voice, the curious crinkle of his brow, exposes a laughable innocence. He definitely does not understand the appeal of himself as a subject— though he does like it, very much, because he enjoys the way Armand's gaze slides over him, like a soft, liquid thing; he enjoys the fact that Armand is obligated to sit in the same room with him, and let him hear his small thoughtful sounds and light scrapes and scribbles, his sighs, his occasional deviations to pet the cat.
(Hopefully the cat will not start eating their guest. Like it's fine if so, but.)
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Armand has insisted on this turn of conversation, he knows, but still acknowledges the beat of self-consciousness in himself. Daniel, as flippant and sarcastic and deflective as anyone Armand has met, and so maybe it's justified, some fear of verbalising the vulnerable for what will become of it after. Laughed at, ignored, dismissed.
But it hasn't really been that way, particularly not when Daniel settles on asking him a question. So, alright. He considers the answer, the usual suspects of why a person may find an older man attractive. Age as virtue, as signs of experience, as authority and frailty in one thing, and isn't all that true anyway? Puts it aside, opens his mouth to speak.
"Because you're handsome," he says. "Because I like the way you're put together. I like your body and the way you move it. Even when you were mortal, ailing, you seemed strong to me beneath it. I liked to watch your hands when they weren't trembling. I like it even more now that I've made you stronger."
He can imagine this litany being a little unbearable. He hopes so. Words beneath the skin. "I like that you've been turned at the age that you are. I'm bored of the ones turned young, kept that way, of youth like that. I don't think I could touch one and feel something, anymore."
They were talking about drawing. But also not. Also talking of preservation. Of having. Still, to answer the question, "I want to show you. The things I see."
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What does he expect? Something about studying Daniel like a bug in a jar. Scientific diagrams. Something strange and otherworldly, a screwed up aspect of their connection that Armand indulges in and Daniel enjoys. That it could be as simple as Armand liking how he looks stuns him, for some reason. He has thought that Armand finds him at least not intolerable-looking, but figured it was a little bit 'fucked up kink' and mostly 'despite', when it came to sexual attraction.
Maybe it is some of that still. I'm bored of the ones turned young, that's very Armand-specific, fixing him in this place that Armand likes, keeping him for himself. But does Daniel mind? ... Not really. Not as much as he should.
And it isn't that he thinks of himself as ugly. He was always alright, he figured. He got by. But looking the way he does now, the full physical manifestation of his age, is not attractive. He's come to terms with it, has had decades to come to terms with it in realtime, every change happening outside of his own control, his health slipping out of his hands along with everything else. Maybe, if they were sober, he'd feel a flutter and huff about it, because a few pretty words can't undo all the scaffolding he's built to cope with aging.
But they aren't sober. Armand's words are perfectly sincere, and they undo some little knot in Daniel, and begin to stitch something else.
Still. He looks positively shy, hearing all that. It is unbearable, in its way.
"No one's ever... I mean, even when I was younger, and looked alright." Fumbling. Like he's still the kid he's referring to. "Did you know, you have this ability to make me feel things that are completely new."
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"We've run quite the gamut," he says. "Of feelings."
He shifts. Folds an arm on Daniel's chest, rests his head there. A habit for liking being on top, in the most basic sense of the premise. "There's a school of thought about mood. And beauty. Where it is located, the relationship between the feelings of a person, the thing they have a feeling towards. The existentialist says that these moods are the subjective lens through which we view the world, rendering it real that way.
"I find it compelling." The patch of carpet he is watching is rippling, warping. Swimming creatures beneath. He extends a hand, touches the pile. His senses contradict the vision. It's pleasing. "A world that is empty of mood and beauty and love until someone deigns to perceive it that way. Objects, people, places. Compelling but not convincing. I think beauty has locations. Manifestations. I think feelings can be transmitted."
Stops short of reflecting on God, His part in it all. Easy to do. All of it buried.
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His head drops back, and he slides one hand up and down Armand's spine, slow and rhythmic. He thinks he can feel all the charcoal he draws with. He wonders if Armand will draw anything he remembers from this trip. If Daniel looks different here. If they've transformed.
"Like how we don't really know what anything looks like," he supposes. "Just light bouncing off things, and... imaginary colors, like magenta." Daniel wrinkles his nose. "Is it magenta?"
Maybe it's cyan. Armand's the artist, not him.
"Beauty probably does have locations." Like wherever Armand happens to be. Very good paintings. Perfect sunsets. "What are you transmitting, right now?"
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Mumbled in place.
Thinking about the existentialists he has evoked and quantum physics, whether their emergences betray some overlap, but narrowly avoids launching into a ramble down this path. Mostly, Armand makes note to himself to look up some books, and otherwise—
Considers the question. Imagines the way they are tangled together, physical limbs and his own strange impression of clinging vines, growing roots. He doesn't know too much about the vampire bond, such as it is, but he knows that what he experiences of it, what he thinks he experiences of it, is unlike anything he has heard. Maybe they just don't speak of it; he wouldn't. Or maybe it's different.
He winds around that shivering, metal thread that exists between them, that sometimes he thinks he can feel even better when they are physically apart, but can feel it now anyway. Pulls against it. The sense of Daniel bound to him, forever. The sense of Daniel belonging to him.
His. His fledgling.
"That depends on the receiver."
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Maybe that's why the sex is so good. Less about sex (though, a lot about sex, still), more about the sledgehammer complement to this beautiful thread.
Daniel winds his arms around Armand. A sense of possession, a sense of wanting to be possessed. This monster made him. Armand looked into him and saw that he had accidentally been born a person, and fixed him. By making him a monster, too.
Oh, that's kind of a question, huh.
"Yeah?"
Everyone's favorite word. There's a smile in it.
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