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.
Daniel puts his arms around him and Armand imagines it a little like iron, or titanium, or the kind of industrial grade ropes they make for mechanical winching, offshore towing. More or less inescapable, unbreakable, and deeply assuring for it. Doesn't think it, but feels it, that he is being embraced by someone who is not counting on releasing him again. Does not make him feel they are counting down the seconds.
"Yeah," nearly voiceless.
Maybe some time goes by. Armand can't be certain. Tripping the light fantastic as they exist as one organism, in the way a well planned and curated garden is one organism, or the untamed sprawl of woodland is one organism.
"Would you ever do it?" is asked, somewhere in this warm pool of time, before it occurs to him that they are not so enmeshed that he doesn't need to clarify, so he adds, "Make one?"
A receiver. Receptive. Collecting Armand's transmission and threading it through the tape player of his mind, hearing shapes and vines and blooms. There's a sex joke in that one too. But it feels sacred right now, and easy; an effortless, impossible cross-section of the two, found right here with Armand resting against him.
Daniel is drawing something on his maker's back. Trying to mimic his favorite sketchy shapes, the ones he thinks look the most satisfying, and that make the nicest scratchy sounds when he's working. He sees patterns on the ceiling, figures getting up to become constellations. It's pleasant. Hypnotic. Relaxing. Will Armand want to sink like this with him again? Will he want to stay, even after this night? Will forever feel this way, at least now and again? It'd be really, really good, if so.
That question is... interesting.
Daniel hums to acknowledge hearing, and gives himself some more of that time in their comfortable pool to consider his answer.
"I don't have any interest in it," he says eventually. "Maybe I'll change my mind someday, like you did. But that potential is so far off I can't see the shape of it."
A touch to the back of Armand's neck, swirling shapes through his hair.
It is a question that cascades into many more. Not only the ethical and philosophical aspect of making a vampire, but the personal. Would Daniel seek other companionship? Would he want it in that fashion? What, to him, would make a good vampire? And so on.
Daniel, drawing shapes along his back, into his hair. Armand has the sense of them both being charcoal sketches, shaped by each others smudged fingertips.
"As do I."
He wonders if he would kill this hypothetical, unlikely fledgling, or if he would stand frozen at the sidelines of the thing as yet another tectonic plate shifted, formed a new ocean. Or if he would decide on the latter and one day snap and do it anyway. If Daniel would mind very much.
So far off, Daniel says. Armand thinks he is quite good at seeing to that distance, even if his past feels like smudged charcoal.
"I thought I knew you well," he says, as he thinks these things. "I thought I'd seen the depths of you before that moment. I suppose I had. But it's different. It's like a last flood of information before you become a black box. It's like I had you inside of me before I fed you yourself. And I did it very slowly."
Daniel could not make a marriage work, or second another marriage; he could not make a paternal relationship work. Time will still have to tell if this is working, but he suspects it's going to work far better than his mortal connections. Like the trick of it is to be a fucking disaster— get all the worst out ahead of everything else.
He doesn't know if he'd want to commit to that with anyone. Armand didn't give him a choice, and as fucked as that was, he thinks he prefers it. Which does not bode well for his prospects on making one.
No. Content with just them. He likes being Armand's only tether (ignoring the lurking maybe-maker back down the line behind Amadeo). He likes not having any flowing out of him. He hadn't really wanted to be a parent, he hadn't really wanted to be a husband. This is better.
"Do you think about it?" he asks. "Turning me?"
His memories of it have become clearer, over time, but it's still a bloody, disorienting mess.
"I do. For a second, I think I heard you in my head. Did I?"
A strange period of time. Armand was not subject to the same utter disorientation that he dragged Daniel through, but still disoriented. Out of body, a little. In this moment, he thinks of Peanut, lamp eyed beneath the shadow of a chair, claws dug into the wooly interior of a slipper. Curious about what is happening in his little cat brain.
Hard to decipher what was going on in his own, on reflection. A series of actions, words, impulses, curiousities. And he was so—
Angry? He supposes so. A tree alight in a gallery.
"And yes," to answer the other question. "I didn't know if we would see each other again soon. I knew I couldn't be around you then. I tried to understand why I'd done what I'd done by explaining it." Amusement in his tone, lifting his head again. "You turned it back to me. As you are wont to do."
Daniel, somehow seeing through half a millennia, straight to the soul of who Amadeo was when he become immortal.
"It was selfish of me," he adds, but there is something warm in his tone. Pleased with himself, for doing the selfish thing.
(Yes, certain other vampires might scoff at this idea, that this is a change in behaviour for Armand. Perhaps they are right to.)
Daniel's just a black hole. Dragging in light, experiences, information. Answers to his questions. He was interested in Armand in Dubai, even when he was telling him to shut up. He was interested in Armand while he was being tortured, because every psychopath has a motive. He was interested in Armand even in the bar the evening before. A beautiful, strange man, a thousand miles out of Daniel's league, and his boyfriend was stepping out on him.
Why? How fucking nuts must that guy be, for Louis to be looking elsewhere?
Pretty fucking nuts, it turns out. Daniel combs his fingers through his hair. Selfish. Yeah, he can see that. He can see the way Armand rationalizes and makes excuses. But there isn't one for Daniel, is there.
"Something for yourself," he observes. Him, that's the something. "You said one hundred years, but then you missed my annoying ass, huh."
Amused. Warming to banter, to the tone in Daniel's voice. It is a reductive description of the stressors that led to him finding Daniel again, but not completely inadequate for it.
"You were out of your mind during your turning," Armand adds, tipping his head as he loos at him. Shifting to settle comfortably like this on top, arms folded. "You were in a different country. You thought I was someone you'd picked up. That you'd done rather well for yourself."
There'd been little moments in the interview that, if Daniel wasn't busy internally retching at the happily married routine, were potentially a little funny. Both of them with a habit for fondly recounting horrifying things. Hunting guys for sport, both of them with separate kinds of reminiscing smiles.
Some of that energy, speaking fondly of Daniel dying and delirious.
What can he say, it was an internally retch-inducting routine.
Daniel continues to slowly move his hand up and down Armand's back, his elegant spine, the column of his neck, the base of his skull. He rests there sometimes, rubbing near his hairline. Thinking about stars, and vines, and how beautiful Armand is. How much like an interesting, dangerous insect, or like an alien, an HR Giger drawing. Beautiful, but horrible.
Funny, sometimes. Stupid sunglasses. Mean comments. Veering between nerdy and cutting. Daniel is leagues past shouldn't find it charming.
"Sounds like me." He'd have been baffled, indeed. Punching way above his weight. "A little spike to my dumbass ego before putting me into the craziest tailspin, that's nice of you."
A languid shift of configuration, just a little, vampiric grace and strength and even a manipulable sense of gravity take away some of the charming human fumbling around weight distribution, pointy elbows and knees. Moves so they are eye to eye again, Armand's hands coming to rest gently on the rug on either side of Daniel's head.
Floating, a little, but still pressed close. In a funny way, it feels like they're standing against each other.
"And how's your ego faring now?"
Little peeking hints of fang, a lazy hooded look to his expression, but still, eyes of sunset orange as slivers of their own light.
When Daniel realizes how Armand is moving, the wonder in his expression becomes more pronounced. It's just cool when he uses his powers. When he acts like they're as natural as any other part of him. Daniel remembers the first time he saw him, that ridiculous display. He'd been angry at him for lying and for the charade, but he'd been so impressed, too. Fascinated. (Haha.) It makes him feel good at Armand is comfortable enough to just be, around him.
A soft laugh, at the question. He sees flowers growing around Armand.
"Oh, inflated to the fucking moon." Armand called him handsome. Said he likes his body, likes drawing him, is happy he made him. Daniel is flustered and smug and happy and curious and all of it, all of it. He smiles and it distorts his face, aged as it is, but it's clear the mood is genuine. "You're so... you're the prettiest plant. And cool. The floating, it's cool..."
Hearing himself. Daniel scrunches his nose and closes his eyes, sigh. Still laughing. He knows he sounds like an idiot with a crush, not an old man talking to his own maker.
There, a breath of a rare laugh that shows his teeth when he's called the prettiest plant. Because Daniel is funny and very high and fumbly when he is being sweet, and they can almost pretend there is anything like youth between them in these little moments.
Or maybe there is. This thing they share now is young. Daniel is still getting his bearings, learning. Armand, too, a new maker. Maybe that's all what it is.
"I'm cool," Armand echoes, as if pondering this assignment. Teasing. Even more unlikely than being a pretty plant. Even more likely than being called a seed with all of its potential. Endearing for it. Daniel's eyes are closed, so Armand uses his hands to touch at his face, guide him into a kiss.
A proper one. He isn't sure what sex will be like on the drugs they are on, how quick they are to fade, but he is in the mood to pursue the things he wants.
Doubling down, despite being embarrassed at himself. Daniel murmurs it, smiles at the way Armand's fingers are on his face, and then smiles more at the kiss. Tangible beneath Armand's mouth before he reciprocates.
Mostly mushrooms, but there'd been some ecstasy too in the cocktail of the dead woman— mostly to fortify against paranoia and bad trips, build a buffer around Armand staring too long into the void. This is the other benefit: everything feels extra good, extra easy, ready and waiting to slip over into the warm water of sensuality, pleasantly wrapped in the heightened sensory experience of it all.
Terrifying, cool, a monster, his murderer, the prettiest plant. A person he likes to make out with.
Hands smoothing downwards, until his fingertips find the circling, overlapped scars at Daniel's throat. Louis' tearing teeth, and his own daintier contribution somewhere in the knot of coarse tissue. Strokes along it, around it, as they kiss.
And it does all feel good and easy, settling with his thighs on either side of Daniel's, a pleasant alignment of their hips, letting a more human sense of gravity pull them together. His body feels extra alive and receptive, as if all these little grasping hallucinated fronds and leaves and petals are reaching out, tangling, rooting together in the barely-any-space between them.
A fair chance he could be content with just this, where sex is barely the transaction interlocking of parts but some extra-planar sharing, strange and romantic. But he can feel all the mechanical things beginning to shift, blood flow and flesh, and he indulges in a shifting movement, hips pressing, rubbing just a little as they kiss.
Touch to the scars on his neck is a dice roll between shivery and nothing; he still experiences sensation there, but like all scar tissue, it comes and goes. Tonight, now, be it the drugs or the mood or Armand or all of it, feeling is cranked up. Like the wound is connected to his nervous system in a unique way. Something once touched by the supernatural, made a permanent part of him.
Swaddled in vines and stars. Daniel kisses him, and kisses him, and one of his roaming hands moves down lower on its path, and incorporates squeezing Armand's rear into the equation. He feels comfortable, he trusts that this kind of touch is alright for him to do, and he hopes that's still the case. He likes fooling around with Armand. It's fun, and profound. Hints of something kinkier lurking, while being some of the most emotionally significant encounters he's ever had.
The most? Maybe. Probably.
The thread that binds them seems to wind closer. Like it, too, is wrapping around them with everything else. They can't read each other, but they can feel each other. One heartbeat.
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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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"Yeah," nearly voiceless.
Maybe some time goes by. Armand can't be certain. Tripping the light fantastic as they exist as one organism, in the way a well planned and curated garden is one organism, or the untamed sprawl of woodland is one organism.
"Would you ever do it?" is asked, somewhere in this warm pool of time, before it occurs to him that they are not so enmeshed that he doesn't need to clarify, so he adds, "Make one?"
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Daniel is drawing something on his maker's back. Trying to mimic his favorite sketchy shapes, the ones he thinks look the most satisfying, and that make the nicest scratchy sounds when he's working. He sees patterns on the ceiling, figures getting up to become constellations. It's pleasant. Hypnotic. Relaxing. Will Armand want to sink like this with him again? Will he want to stay, even after this night? Will forever feel this way, at least now and again? It'd be really, really good, if so.
That question is... interesting.
Daniel hums to acknowledge hearing, and gives himself some more of that time in their comfortable pool to consider his answer.
"I don't have any interest in it," he says eventually. "Maybe I'll change my mind someday, like you did. But that potential is so far off I can't see the shape of it."
A touch to the back of Armand's neck, swirling shapes through his hair.
"I like that it's just us."
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Daniel, drawing shapes along his back, into his hair. Armand has the sense of them both being charcoal sketches, shaped by each others smudged fingertips.
"As do I."
He wonders if he would kill this hypothetical, unlikely fledgling, or if he would stand frozen at the sidelines of the thing as yet another tectonic plate shifted, formed a new ocean. Or if he would decide on the latter and one day snap and do it anyway. If Daniel would mind very much.
So far off, Daniel says. Armand thinks he is quite good at seeing to that distance, even if his past feels like smudged charcoal.
"I thought I knew you well," he says, as he thinks these things. "I thought I'd seen the depths of you before that moment. I suppose I had. But it's different. It's like a last flood of information before you become a black box. It's like I had you inside of me before I fed you yourself. And I did it very slowly."
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He doesn't know if he'd want to commit to that with anyone. Armand didn't give him a choice, and as fucked as that was, he thinks he prefers it. Which does not bode well for his prospects on making one.
No. Content with just them. He likes being Armand's only tether (ignoring the lurking maybe-maker back down the line behind Amadeo). He likes not having any flowing out of him. He hadn't really wanted to be a parent, he hadn't really wanted to be a husband. This is better.
"Do you think about it?" he asks. "Turning me?"
His memories of it have become clearer, over time, but it's still a bloody, disorienting mess.
"I do. For a second, I think I heard you in my head. Did I?"
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A strange period of time. Armand was not subject to the same utter disorientation that he dragged Daniel through, but still disoriented. Out of body, a little. In this moment, he thinks of Peanut, lamp eyed beneath the shadow of a chair, claws dug into the wooly interior of a slipper. Curious about what is happening in his little cat brain.
Hard to decipher what was going on in his own, on reflection. A series of actions, words, impulses, curiousities. And he was so—
Angry? He supposes so. A tree alight in a gallery.
"And yes," to answer the other question. "I didn't know if we would see each other again soon. I knew I couldn't be around you then. I tried to understand why I'd done what I'd done by explaining it." Amusement in his tone, lifting his head again. "You turned it back to me. As you are wont to do."
Daniel, somehow seeing through half a millennia, straight to the soul of who Amadeo was when he become immortal.
"It was selfish of me," he adds, but there is something warm in his tone. Pleased with himself, for doing the selfish thing.
(Yes, certain other vampires might scoff at this idea, that this is a change in behaviour for Armand. Perhaps they are right to.)
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Daniel's just a black hole. Dragging in light, experiences, information. Answers to his questions. He was interested in Armand in Dubai, even when he was telling him to shut up. He was interested in Armand while he was being tortured, because every psychopath has a motive. He was interested in Armand even in the bar the evening before. A beautiful, strange man, a thousand miles out of Daniel's league, and his boyfriend was stepping out on him.
Why? How fucking nuts must that guy be, for Louis to be looking elsewhere?
Pretty fucking nuts, it turns out. Daniel combs his fingers through his hair. Selfish. Yeah, he can see that. He can see the way Armand rationalizes and makes excuses. But there isn't one for Daniel, is there.
"Something for yourself," he observes. Him, that's the something. "You said one hundred years, but then you missed my annoying ass, huh."
Also pleased with himself.
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Amused. Warming to banter, to the tone in Daniel's voice. It is a reductive description of the stressors that led to him finding Daniel again, but not completely inadequate for it.
"You were out of your mind during your turning," Armand adds, tipping his head as he loos at him. Shifting to settle comfortably like this on top, arms folded. "You were in a different country. You thought I was someone you'd picked up. That you'd done rather well for yourself."
There'd been little moments in the interview that, if Daniel wasn't busy internally retching at the happily married routine, were potentially a little funny. Both of them with a habit for fondly recounting horrifying things. Hunting guys for sport, both of them with separate kinds of reminiscing smiles.
Some of that energy, speaking fondly of Daniel dying and delirious.
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Daniel continues to slowly move his hand up and down Armand's back, his elegant spine, the column of his neck, the base of his skull. He rests there sometimes, rubbing near his hairline. Thinking about stars, and vines, and how beautiful Armand is. How much like an interesting, dangerous insect, or like an alien, an HR Giger drawing. Beautiful, but horrible.
Funny, sometimes. Stupid sunglasses. Mean comments. Veering between nerdy and cutting. Daniel is leagues past shouldn't find it charming.
"Sounds like me." He'd have been baffled, indeed. Punching way above his weight. "A little spike to my dumbass ego before putting me into the craziest tailspin, that's nice of you."
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Floating, a little, but still pressed close. In a funny way, it feels like they're standing against each other.
"And how's your ego faring now?"
Little peeking hints of fang, a lazy hooded look to his expression, but still, eyes of sunset orange as slivers of their own light.
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A soft laugh, at the question. He sees flowers growing around Armand.
"Oh, inflated to the fucking moon." Armand called him handsome. Said he likes his body, likes drawing him, is happy he made him. Daniel is flustered and smug and happy and curious and all of it, all of it. He smiles and it distorts his face, aged as it is, but it's clear the mood is genuine. "You're so... you're the prettiest plant. And cool. The floating, it's cool..."
Hearing himself. Daniel scrunches his nose and closes his eyes, sigh. Still laughing. He knows he sounds like an idiot with a crush, not an old man talking to his own maker.
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Or maybe there is. This thing they share now is young. Daniel is still getting his bearings, learning. Armand, too, a new maker. Maybe that's all what it is.
"I'm cool," Armand echoes, as if pondering this assignment. Teasing. Even more unlikely than being a pretty plant. Even more likely than being called a seed with all of its potential. Endearing for it. Daniel's eyes are closed, so Armand uses his hands to touch at his face, guide him into a kiss.
A proper one. He isn't sure what sex will be like on the drugs they are on, how quick they are to fade, but he is in the mood to pursue the things he wants.
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Doubling down, despite being embarrassed at himself. Daniel murmurs it, smiles at the way Armand's fingers are on his face, and then smiles more at the kiss. Tangible beneath Armand's mouth before he reciprocates.
Mostly mushrooms, but there'd been some ecstasy too in the cocktail of the dead woman— mostly to fortify against paranoia and bad trips, build a buffer around Armand staring too long into the void. This is the other benefit: everything feels extra good, extra easy, ready and waiting to slip over into the warm water of sensuality, pleasantly wrapped in the heightened sensory experience of it all.
Terrifying, cool, a monster, his murderer, the prettiest plant. A person he likes to make out with.
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And it does all feel good and easy, settling with his thighs on either side of Daniel's, a pleasant alignment of their hips, letting a more human sense of gravity pull them together. His body feels extra alive and receptive, as if all these little grasping hallucinated fronds and leaves and petals are reaching out, tangling, rooting together in the barely-any-space between them.
A fair chance he could be content with just this, where sex is barely the transaction interlocking of parts but some extra-planar sharing, strange and romantic. But he can feel all the mechanical things beginning to shift, blood flow and flesh, and he indulges in a shifting movement, hips pressing, rubbing just a little as they kiss.
Or make out.
Perhaps there is nothing wrong with both.
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Swaddled in vines and stars. Daniel kisses him, and kisses him, and one of his roaming hands moves down lower on its path, and incorporates squeezing Armand's rear into the equation. He feels comfortable, he trusts that this kind of touch is alright for him to do, and he hopes that's still the case. He likes fooling around with Armand. It's fun, and profound. Hints of something kinkier lurking, while being some of the most emotionally significant encounters he's ever had.
The most? Maybe. Probably.
The thread that binds them seems to wind closer. Like it, too, is wrapping around them with everything else. They can't read each other, but they can feel each other. One heartbeat.
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