"Uh huh." A bit like Yeah, but more teasing. Something he said to his (longsuffering) students, Never too old to be a student, to learn more, and Daniel had hated it. Hated being that person. A lifelong problem with authority makes him feel like a fucking tool whenever he's in a position of power, but more than that, it felt impossible to actually live any truth with that line. Dying. Definitely too old.
Not anymore.
So.
"I've made my assistant get me coffee a few times," he says, which betrays the fact that he's been practicing at all, as he no longer drinks coffee. "But she would anyway if I asked. Once in a while, 'Stop' will work on someone."
Someone that he's eating. This feels strange to talk about. Armand is so, so good at that gift. Which he knows intimately.
Armand is not a teacher. He has never felt the impulse, and teaching is an impulse. A skill, a personality. Maybe Daniel has felt like a tool for it in the past, maybe he hated it completely, maybe something about it drew him in. An empathetic ideal, to pass along the lesson, whether you believe it anymore or not.
But no, Armand has been director, dictator, and for longer than that, a symbol of something, and has he had conviction in those things, even then? Did he ever guide the vampires beneath him, or simply set the terms and wait? How well did he teach Louis anything that wasn't, also, his own way of leveraging an advantage? What did Lestat do with his lessons, but run off with them?
But Daniel is here, listening to him. Daniel is here because Armand put him here. A punishment.
"Directives are useful," he says. "But not everything. Your assistant will obey you because she's your assistant. Your prey will stop, because part of them would like to as well."
A nod—let's cross here. Through the gap in the traffic.
"But we're speaking of selection, not just subdual. I know in the interview, there was some talk of seeking the sin. Weaknesses. I can show you something else."
He walks after him, listening, and compartmentalizing. Watching the decisions he's making and putting pins in them. As if perhaps he's planning a revised autobiography, preparing to explain himself. Physician, heal thyself; insufferably combative investigative journalist, interrogate thyself.
(A Biblical quote regarded as being about criticizing of hypocrisy. Maybe his train of thought should give it a rest.)
"I'm listening."
It's his job. Ha ha. But he sounds more open here, less hostile. They aren't opponents sitting across a table from each other— Armand has made him something else. Put this strange obligation between them; Armand, obligated to explain, Daniel, obligated to hear.
He thinks they're both learning. Armand hasn't done this before, he's certain. Because even if he's ever helped a 'young' vampire before, it was never a vampire whose mind he couldn't read. Who he created.
Across the street, and over a block. A little park in the middle of the city.
The ways he has helped fledglings who stumble into his hands has been different. Show them how to hide, how to behave, and then burn them to nothing if they refuse. If they fail to adapt, or fail to break it all like a single one of them had managed. If he had burned Lestat too, would he be living, still, in squalor beneath the streets of modern Paris? Probably not. Part of Lestat's charm had been the impossibility of such a thing as the world became brighter and brighter.
Pointless. They arrive at a park bench, and Armand sits, making room for Daniel to sit along beside him. He doesn't feel nervous for this most unusual lesson, detached from the possibility. They adapt or they fail. They change him or they don't. And Daniel already has.
"That building," he says, a nod. Across the way, a tall apartment complex, midrange rentals, some permanent residencies. "Focus on it like a single object. You'll sift from the rest of the world the minds within it."
A park bench in New York. They're really doing the thing.
"Okay," Daniel says. He can do that. Well. He can do the focus part of it, who knows about the rest. But he's very curious about all this, and the mental powers aspect of this life are undoubtedly the thing he finds most alluring. Parts defensive, never to be fucked with that way again, and parts because he already has a knack for getting into people.
Perverse to have a lesson from this person, considering.
He lets it all go. A slow breath in, and out, as he stares at the building. Considers the shape of it and the people inside. Allows everything else to become unfocused; he slips away from the crush of human minds milling around the city, and glances into the bright spots within the bottle of the apartment complex.
Nothing else. Just the building. And, aha, Armand beside him.
"A little over one hundred souls, by my estimate. As you grow, as you practice, you can broaden the amount of data you're willing to receive without doing yourself harm. In a high density city like this, you needn't reach further than a block to find a viable mark. But, for now, a building."
The book is kept balanced on his lap, Armand gazing up at the structure, casting out his awareness. There is no chance of overlap. They will not be able to feel each other drifting over the same minds. They will make do.
Armand has, for now, disconnected from any sense of appropriateness. Who they are to each other, the things they have done—his sins, titanically outweighing the ways Daniel has transgressed against him, and the ways in which those sins were done. It doesn't matter. Daniel has dared him.
"I find the one who can't stand to be in the place they are in," eventually. "Or the one who thinks they can never leave it. I take my time, doing it. And then I invite them out."
Doing yourself harm. Louis describing Lestat with blood streaming out of his ears. Notes, notes. Daniel observes. He can't see into Armand's head, but he can, if he tries, perceive what he's doing outside of it. Difficult to fix his awareness on, like a psychic magic eye picture.
But he's patient. Attentive. Curious about it, and eager to learn this even as it feels like a sinister caress against nerves left raw by the past so recently remembered. Daniel leans with his elbows on his knees (posture made youthful again, almost looking like a young man wearing a costume). Armand wants his victims to ask for it.
Is this 'sin', to be sought? Or is it just another kind of vigilantism? Mercy? If you must kill, might as well kill those who deserve death. What about those who want it? I like my life, from 1973, from an hour ago. Daniel watches Armand weave this spell of a lure, and his unease blooms into determination. No one will be able to pull anything like that on him again. No one will do this to him. He'll see it from now on.
Another steadying breath. He looks through these minds, careful, gentle.
There's no rush. Dawn is miles away. And there is plenty to listen to.
Idle thoughts, dreams, murmured conversation, the buzz of the television, the single mother pacing a room anxiously while she tries to get her crying infant to sleep and not disturb her neighbours, disturbed neighbours, a dog scratching at a bathroom door, one couple making perfunctory love, a woman practicing her acoustic guitar, and
come to me
a lonely soul. Watching television, preoccupied with past bad decisions, a recent breakup, a job he doesn't want. He is a little nexus of ordinary melancholia, this man. The stress of a decent, even remarkable salary and rising costs of living. He knows he has to downsize. Pare down, cut down, slice and slice.
"Have you found him?" Armand inquires. He cannot direct Daniel's focus, but he has his own set on this mortal, gently encouraging this unspooling of despair, watching it grow colder and colder, denser and darker.
The man decides he has to get out of his head, out of his apartment, or he'll go nuts.
A siren luring sailors to the rocks. He can see Armand that way: ethereal, closer to divinity than humanity, talons like a predatory bird, delicate, decorative feathers. Something beautiful and something wrong. A haunting, alluring voice that wants you to die. Get out of the apartment. Sail into the rocks. It's better. It's what you want.
A mother thinking of smothering her infant. A guy shaking with post-rage adrenaline, terrified of what he just did to his girlfriend. Somebody who's voting conservative and leaving anonymous hate speech on social media. And, yes, a man with a bad job and a recent ex.
"Your guy? Yeah."
The temptation is there to interfere. He wonders if Armand can tell— even if just because it would be typical of Daniel to shove his fingers in where they shouldn't go, ask a mean, biting question. But here maybe there'd be a nudge. Yeah, but tomorrow will be fine. Hasn't he been this guy? Wouldn't he still be this guy, if not for Louis?
He doesn't push. He watches. Armand can do this to mortals, and to other vampires. Daniel wants to see it.
What is a victim of a vampire's appetite if not a human on a bad day?
Armand is aware of the ways Daniel could dissect this moment, any moment, in the way he is aware of gravity, of the sky above them. It is simply a constant. Daniel chooses not to and Armand nods once at the words he says instead, acknowledgment. They can watch together as the man throws on a jacket, heads for the elevator, slips down the spine of the building.
The mother with her child does not answer his call, preoccupied with her own ill-feeling, her awful sense of responsibility. The man, enraged with his woman and himself, does not listen for the quiet being promised. Armand doesn't offer it to them.
Out the front doors of the building, the man turns a corner. The bodega for smokes, he is thinking. Then, Daniel will probably be able to tell, secondhand, the way he changes his mind: no, let's go for a walk.
Little nudges like a psychic sheep dog. It's interesting. A silent interrogation, carefully moving a person's whole mental state around to find the answer being shielded. There's a keen familiarity in it. Conversational fencing is similar.
Armand accused Daniel's work of being no different than killing. The connection is instantaneous, a tiny, clear spark of a reveal. Oh.
"You're the boss, boss."
Motherfucker. There's a ruefulness in his voice. No mind-reading, but he wonders if Armand will connect what he's connected, or if he's too out of practice to regular-read. He gets up when his maker does, and walks with him, to—? Who's leading, here, what's the lure?
The lure: the man starts seeking somewhere quiet. A suggestion, like calm black water, like when he and his friends would go to the seaside back home in Maryland. It might put him at ease.
And the way Armand can't read Daniel is beginning to madden him.
But they walk. It's an ambitious walk, nothing this mortal would seek to accomplish on his own if he were in his right mind, if he weren't following an impulse. He will seek the water and realise there is no coming back to the things that made him happy, and this is where selection is subdual. They will drink his blood, slip his body into those black waters. The hunt will be over.
Would it be more fun, if it was a chase?
"We have some time to kill," comes out a little sharp. Probably not a purposeful vampire joke. "If you would like to speak your mind."
Time to kill. Blenders. Armand's a funny guy, though he doesn't seem to know it. The sharpness is also funny, in its way, and Daniel has to put a conscious effort in not to smile. Aware that Armand has noticed him processing something, and that, apparently, Armand can't begin to guess. A total lack of ability to read people? Or just Daniel?
He considers the amount of time Armand spent as a mortal compared to the length of time he's been alive. Even if Armand had been a very keen observer, had honed his ability to predict people as a self-defense mechanism like many abuse victims do, it's been centuries since he's had to bother with it. Daniel makes a note of it. Cheat less. Don't lose this. Fuck eating a mortal meal once a week, practice humanity by continuing to be good at poker without telepathy.
But Armand asks, and this strikes Daniel as a good thing. Even with the edge. He's being invited to share, to engage. And so: he does.
"Back in Dubai." Striking this match. Talking about then, out loud and deliberate, instead of alluding. "When you were still wearing the costume. You accused me, in my capacity as a journalist, of doing the same thing as killing. Got a little dramatic. But I see what you meant, now. You were looking at it like this, weren't you?"
Armand listens, and does so by watching Daniel as they walk rather than playing at aloof. Back in Dubai, and the natural twinge towards anxiety is matched only by his interest in the thread being taken back up. Masochistic, maybe. He has his tendencies.
A hooded lowering of his eyes before his focus goes back to where they're going.
"I wanted to provoke you. You were being judgmental."
He pauses for the span of a step or two, and then bids, "Elaborate," because it hadn't been that simple, either. Maybe Daniel sees more of himself in this than Armand did in Daniel's work.
A note of interest, about provocation, and judgement. Daniel gives him a look, but doesn't follow up. (Yet?) Might be fun to dissect who was being provocative because it was his job, and who was being judgemental. Another kind of conversational fencing match.
One thing at a time.
"When you want to interview somebody and make it real, get to the truth of why you're there, you have to get past the first answer, and the second answer, and the third. You have to redirect and argue and provoke until you get to the truth. Usually it's not because people are lying to you. They're lying to themselves, or they just don't realize they aren't going far enough. Nobody wants to say the embarrassing thing, the worst thing. You do have to talk them up to the ledge, and then get them to walk off of it. Whether it's in confession or anger."
"'I don't write puff portraiture', you said," Armand says.
Agreeing, rather than making a point, although Daniel would be forgiven for not being able to differentiate the tone. Who wins literary awards, chronicling the lives of phantoms of a person on their best day? And rarely do people win those awards by trying to win awards. They do it by being built this way.
"Focus on him," back to the lesson, for a moment, "his mind. His scent. We're going to go the long way."
Attract less attention. The mark disappears around a corner, and Armand nudges their trajectory to move out of sight, if in parallel, disappearing through late night traffic, sparse crowds.
"You feel it, when you're getting close. You thrill for it, live for it. Lived," vampire jokes on purpose. "A hunt can feel the same."
Agreement, he thinks. Armand is slippery (not all on purpose?). But Daniel is learning.
Oh, right. Also learning vampire shit.
He makes an attempt at putting a pin on the man that Armand has lured out of the building with immense sadness (what a way to do it), and at trying to keep part of his awareness there. Multitasking. He loses the man right away, but slows his steps and considers, and ends up finding him again. He does almost bump into a fellow pedestrian walking in the opposite direction as this goes on, but he recovers, walking beside Armand with his hands in his pockets and looking very normal and un-flustered. Yep.
"It's a puzzle that opens a lock." An odd thing to stay about journalism, perhaps. "It's an unraveling. A bang. Takes all kinds. You get there, and then you get to go past there."
His mark feels like a beacon he can nearly see, a cold point at the edge of his brain oriented in the correct direction. Armand doesn't think to describe this as Daniel keeps pace with him—either it will make sense or it doesn't, or Daniel will have his own way of going about things.
"A peeling back, a luring out." Armand can do both. He prefers the latter when it comes to these kinds of victims, letting them along a path which leads back to himself. His petty cryptofascists are more fun beneath a scalpel.
This, also, he doesn't say. Instead, "Do they appear more human to you, or less? Your puzzles."
He thinks about these things like pins on a map, or a research board; no string involved (usually). In this case the string would be moving, anyway. But it flows along with the way he's connected this to the work he does, it's just a matter of him being able to keep up with it. Easier when he can maintain a line of sight, easier when it's the only thing he's doing, easier when he's not second-guessing the choice of victim.
But Daniel is a fast learner, and he cares more about figuring this out and observing what he can about Armand than he does about the morality.
"Now?"
An odd question. He's not sure what to make of it at first, because everything is both more and less human to him, now. More because it's becoming defining. Less because he feels detached. But he figures Armand means before, actually, and is picking at Daniel's process. So. Reverse back for a less stupid response—
"Everybody's a puzzle." This should be a hard truth, about himself. Something that's been used as an accusation, treating the world like an investigation, seeing everyone in terms of a story and relationships as angles. And yet it's just the way he is. Accepted now that he's ruined every romance, every familial tie, every potential life-long friend. "That probably qualifies as appearing less than human. But I usually like people better when they're puzzles."
He shrugs. Distantly, he traces Armand's chosen mark as he moves around barriers to the water's edge.
A memory, of black tape ejected into the air as if into a vacuum, long inky ribbons. Useless, mundane, trivial, pointless. Armand could imagine a mind like one of those tapes, all coiled up inside of a delicate casing, and slowly dragging it all out into the open, glossy and vapid. He does not like people. He doesn't know if there was a time when he ever had the capacity.
There was a time, though, he might have accused Daniel of it. Misanthropy. He prods around for it now, a way in for dehumanisation, a process that will make the hesitations less—but there, Daniel says it. I usually like people better when they're puzzles.
And then, Armand must think of corruption. Will Daniel become someone who takes people apart for fun? Not for chronicling, not for truth, but for the way their blood tastes. Or perhaps he will go away. Start discarding boring people. He thinks of the couple he'd let go, their inane commentary.
"This way," Armand says.
He doesn't call attention to the way he gently nudges people away from the area. A couple hanging out at the railings discard their cigarettes and decide they've had enough, linking arms and leaving. Others, rerouting, or become distracted, turning around, idling. They'll find their mark sitting on the edge of sloped concrete, where boats would be let into the water. Arms tight around his knees, emanating a despair he has never truly felt before, but has always lived within him, he thinks. Rot, plastered over.
Armand stops. They're at a distance to go unnoticed, for now. He doesn't have to explain that if he were to kill this man, he would feel relief. Daniel has already felt it, ill-gotten though it was.
People are better when they're puzzles, because people suck— prejudiced and stupid, inconsistent, fallible, the dreaded b-word, vapid, selfish, or the worst, just slightly irritating without any grand offsets. Daniel doesn't love people. But he doesn't hate people, and he believes that despite his own pitfalls and inability to connect on a normal, broadly compassionate bleeding heart level, that people are mostly good. Individual people can be good, they can be born good or they can change to become good; societies can rise above, with work. And he believes such work should be encouraged and celebrated, even if he, personally, is frequently mired in bitterness and apathy about the trajectory of the world.
So it's a bit of a bummer to look at this poor fucking guy. He gets it, or at least he thinks he does, but it strikes him that it's already a waste. Armand has godlike power and he uses it to prune a misshapen flower that's already half-wilted instead of an actual invasive weed.
The blood of the dead can pull a vampire down into the grave. They all hear their victims' lives as they die, sung through blood. What do these depressed fucks pull Armand into, time and time again? How is Daniel going to feel draining someone who is, psychologically, half dead already?
He looks at Armand. It's a hard look. Searching. A horrible x-ray of a thing.
Of what he finds there, if anything, he says nothing about.
"Hey," quiet, as he paces over to the man, curled up and half-catatonic. He gets a startled response, gazing up in confusion as a strange old man sits down beside him, hand on his shoulder. Something preternatural enough about Daniel already to hold his attention, and prevent him from casting around for context, from noticing Armand or anything else. A quick exchange that nevertheless, for a moment, seems to stretch on for an eternity. Daniel asks him if he's alright, and the magic of Armand's spell his shattered with a shocked sob, a toyed-with mortal stung by the surprise of random empathy.
Armand is perfectly still under the force of that look.
Maybe a blink out of time once Daniel moves off. An urge to defend himself, which is ridiculous. Daniel had dared him. He chose a single building. Armand does not need to eat every night, not even every week, and he has time to find his perfect invasive weed. This one will simply do. Never mind that Louis has spoken before of what Armand will eat when he can't find his cryptofascists to chase, what Daniel himself has nearly experienced.
He draws in a breath, resettling the book in his arms as he watches Daniel engage with the prey. Feels himself tense as the mortal's world broadens under a show of kindness, like a cracked window. What had Armand expected? That Daniel would repeat his methodology, finish the luring song that has the man slip over the edge into acceptance? No, not really, not on reflection.
And he stays where he is rather than help with clean up, at least not unprompted. After all, didn't he say he wouldn't?
Is this worse? To give the man hope, a sudden soft light, and end it anyway? He clings to Daniel, confused, euphoric, pained. Resignation is too complex a thought for how startled he is, unable to really process what's happening until his heart is pumping too slowly for the thoughts to make it all the way to his brain.
Louis wanted to know if he considered the life of the rabbit. Vegan bait. Throwing paint on classic works of art, reminding you cows are nice. Stupid. You don't have the rabbit's life beamed into your brain when you cut it.
The man dies and Daniel is sated. Maybe he had skipped a meal. Something bloody, a sick crack, puncturing a lung to disrupt buoyancy. Then an easy lift, a shuffle, a shove, a splash. He runs a hand over his mouth before leaning down to rinse them off— one thing to eat a stranger who smelled like sweat and sadness, another to risk tasting public NYC water. The real horror.
Armand strolls his way down the concrete slope a few feet, stopping there still at the top of it. A tall, willowy presence with his cat-bright eyes and chilly composure, the cuddly soft cardigan even more of a costume than it was before.
"I thought this was my test, not yours," he says. When has he ever felt the need to defend his own killings? He had toyed with Louis and his moralising, engaging in the kind of debate that he assumed Lestat had no patience for, and never felt the need to appear more human to the other vampire. Perhaps it's because Daniel is younger. Because it's because it's Daniel, the ever observant, ever opinionated, or because it's Daniel, who dismantled him, and now he is pieces of himself.
He has no pity in the dead meat now sinking into black waters. His fledgling his fed. For that, he feels satisfied.
Imbalanced. Daniel is even shorter this way, though he's always been short, so it hardly matters. He looks up at Armand, with eyes swirling from gold back to blue, the jolt of a pleasant blood-high despite the depressing transfer warming him.
Food, like Claudia said. (More, like everyone else said.)
"It wasn't a test, it was a dare," he reminds him. "And you pulled through, so it's your turn to pick."
Has Armand ever played Truth or Dare? Probably not. Daniel should not be handing him this power. But he just doesn't feel like antagonizing him right now— he has a sense, strangely, that this surreal interaction is plenty, in terms of being a stand-in for needling him about what the fuck he's doing by eating sad people who he's made sadder.
"Doesn't have to be now, now, though." Up the slope. Shoulder to shoulder (and a little lower still, on Daniel's part) in opposite directions.
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Not anymore.
So.
"I've made my assistant get me coffee a few times," he says, which betrays the fact that he's been practicing at all, as he no longer drinks coffee. "But she would anyway if I asked. Once in a while, 'Stop' will work on someone."
Someone that he's eating. This feels strange to talk about. Armand is so, so good at that gift. Which he knows intimately.
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But no, Armand has been director, dictator, and for longer than that, a symbol of something, and has he had conviction in those things, even then? Did he ever guide the vampires beneath him, or simply set the terms and wait? How well did he teach Louis anything that wasn't, also, his own way of leveraging an advantage? What did Lestat do with his lessons, but run off with them?
But Daniel is here, listening to him. Daniel is here because Armand put him here. A punishment.
"Directives are useful," he says. "But not everything. Your assistant will obey you because she's your assistant. Your prey will stop, because part of them would like to as well."
A nod—let's cross here. Through the gap in the traffic.
"But we're speaking of selection, not just subdual. I know in the interview, there was some talk of seeking the sin. Weaknesses. I can show you something else."
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(A Biblical quote regarded as being about criticizing of hypocrisy. Maybe his train of thought should give it a rest.)
"I'm listening."
It's his job. Ha ha. But he sounds more open here, less hostile. They aren't opponents sitting across a table from each other— Armand has made him something else. Put this strange obligation between them; Armand, obligated to explain, Daniel, obligated to hear.
He thinks they're both learning. Armand hasn't done this before, he's certain. Because even if he's ever helped a 'young' vampire before, it was never a vampire whose mind he couldn't read. Who he created.
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The ways he has helped fledglings who stumble into his hands has been different. Show them how to hide, how to behave, and then burn them to nothing if they refuse. If they fail to adapt, or fail to break it all like a single one of them had managed. If he had burned Lestat too, would he be living, still, in squalor beneath the streets of modern Paris? Probably not. Part of Lestat's charm had been the impossibility of such a thing as the world became brighter and brighter.
Pointless. They arrive at a park bench, and Armand sits, making room for Daniel to sit along beside him. He doesn't feel nervous for this most unusual lesson, detached from the possibility. They adapt or they fail. They change him or they don't. And Daniel already has.
"That building," he says, a nod. Across the way, a tall apartment complex, midrange rentals, some permanent residencies. "Focus on it like a single object. You'll sift from the rest of the world the minds within it."
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"Okay," Daniel says. He can do that. Well. He can do the focus part of it, who knows about the rest. But he's very curious about all this, and the mental powers aspect of this life are undoubtedly the thing he finds most alluring. Parts defensive, never to be fucked with that way again, and parts because he already has a knack for getting into people.
Perverse to have a lesson from this person, considering.
He lets it all go. A slow breath in, and out, as he stares at the building. Considers the shape of it and the people inside. Allows everything else to become unfocused; he slips away from the crush of human minds milling around the city, and glances into the bright spots within the bottle of the apartment complex.
Nothing else. Just the building. And, aha, Armand beside him.
Again, quieter, decisive: "Okay."
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The book is kept balanced on his lap, Armand gazing up at the structure, casting out his awareness. There is no chance of overlap. They will not be able to feel each other drifting over the same minds. They will make do.
Armand has, for now, disconnected from any sense of appropriateness. Who they are to each other, the things they have done—his sins, titanically outweighing the ways Daniel has transgressed against him, and the ways in which those sins were done. It doesn't matter. Daniel has dared him.
"I find the one who can't stand to be in the place they are in," eventually. "Or the one who thinks they can never leave it. I take my time, doing it. And then I invite them out."
That old refrain. Come to me.
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But he's patient. Attentive. Curious about it, and eager to learn this even as it feels like a sinister caress against nerves left raw by the past so recently remembered. Daniel leans with his elbows on his knees (posture made youthful again, almost looking like a young man wearing a costume). Armand wants his victims to ask for it.
Is this 'sin', to be sought? Or is it just another kind of vigilantism? Mercy? If you must kill, might as well kill those who deserve death. What about those who want it? I like my life, from 1973, from an hour ago. Daniel watches Armand weave this spell of a lure, and his unease blooms into determination. No one will be able to pull anything like that on him again. No one will do this to him. He'll see it from now on.
Another steadying breath. He looks through these minds, careful, gentle.
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Idle thoughts, dreams, murmured conversation, the buzz of the television, the single mother pacing a room anxiously while she tries to get her crying infant to sleep and not disturb her neighbours, disturbed neighbours, a dog scratching at a bathroom door, one couple making perfunctory love, a woman practicing her acoustic guitar, and
come to me
a lonely soul. Watching television, preoccupied with past bad decisions, a recent breakup, a job he doesn't want. He is a little nexus of ordinary melancholia, this man. The stress of a decent, even remarkable salary and rising costs of living. He knows he has to downsize. Pare down, cut down, slice and slice.
"Have you found him?" Armand inquires. He cannot direct Daniel's focus, but he has his own set on this mortal, gently encouraging this unspooling of despair, watching it grow colder and colder, denser and darker.
The man decides he has to get out of his head, out of his apartment, or he'll go nuts.
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A mother thinking of smothering her infant. A guy shaking with post-rage adrenaline, terrified of what he just did to his girlfriend. Somebody who's voting conservative and leaving anonymous hate speech on social media. And, yes, a man with a bad job and a recent ex.
"Your guy? Yeah."
The temptation is there to interfere. He wonders if Armand can tell— even if just because it would be typical of Daniel to shove his fingers in where they shouldn't go, ask a mean, biting question. But here maybe there'd be a nudge. Yeah, but tomorrow will be fine. Hasn't he been this guy? Wouldn't he still be this guy, if not for Louis?
He doesn't push. He watches. Armand can do this to mortals, and to other vampires. Daniel wants to see it.
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Armand is aware of the ways Daniel could dissect this moment, any moment, in the way he is aware of gravity, of the sky above them. It is simply a constant. Daniel chooses not to and Armand nods once at the words he says instead, acknowledgment. They can watch together as the man throws on a jacket, heads for the elevator, slips down the spine of the building.
The mother with her child does not answer his call, preoccupied with her own ill-feeling, her awful sense of responsibility. The man, enraged with his woman and himself, does not listen for the quiet being promised. Armand doesn't offer it to them.
Out the front doors of the building, the man turns a corner. The bodega for smokes, he is thinking. Then, Daniel will probably be able to tell, secondhand, the way he changes his mind: no, let's go for a walk.
"Shall we?" says Armand.
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Armand accused Daniel's work of being no different than killing. The connection is instantaneous, a tiny, clear spark of a reveal. Oh.
"You're the boss, boss."
Motherfucker. There's a ruefulness in his voice. No mind-reading, but he wonders if Armand will connect what he's connected, or if he's too out of practice to regular-read. He gets up when his maker does, and walks with him, to—? Who's leading, here, what's the lure?
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And the way Armand can't read Daniel is beginning to madden him.
But they walk. It's an ambitious walk, nothing this mortal would seek to accomplish on his own if he were in his right mind, if he weren't following an impulse. He will seek the water and realise there is no coming back to the things that made him happy, and this is where selection is subdual. They will drink his blood, slip his body into those black waters. The hunt will be over.
Would it be more fun, if it was a chase?
"We have some time to kill," comes out a little sharp. Probably not a purposeful vampire joke. "If you would like to speak your mind."
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He considers the amount of time Armand spent as a mortal compared to the length of time he's been alive. Even if Armand had been a very keen observer, had honed his ability to predict people as a self-defense mechanism like many abuse victims do, it's been centuries since he's had to bother with it. Daniel makes a note of it. Cheat less. Don't lose this. Fuck eating a mortal meal once a week, practice humanity by continuing to be good at poker without telepathy.
But Armand asks, and this strikes Daniel as a good thing. Even with the edge. He's being invited to share, to engage. And so: he does.
"Back in Dubai." Striking this match. Talking about then, out loud and deliberate, instead of alluding. "When you were still wearing the costume. You accused me, in my capacity as a journalist, of doing the same thing as killing. Got a little dramatic. But I see what you meant, now. You were looking at it like this, weren't you?"
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A hooded lowering of his eyes before his focus goes back to where they're going.
"I wanted to provoke you. You were being judgmental."
He pauses for the span of a step or two, and then bids, "Elaborate," because it hadn't been that simple, either. Maybe Daniel sees more of himself in this than Armand did in Daniel's work.
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A note of interest, about provocation, and judgement. Daniel gives him a look, but doesn't follow up. (Yet?) Might be fun to dissect who was being provocative because it was his job, and who was being judgemental. Another kind of conversational fencing match.
One thing at a time.
"When you want to interview somebody and make it real, get to the truth of why you're there, you have to get past the first answer, and the second answer, and the third. You have to redirect and argue and provoke until you get to the truth. Usually it's not because people are lying to you. They're lying to themselves, or they just don't realize they aren't going far enough. Nobody wants to say the embarrassing thing, the worst thing. You do have to talk them up to the ledge, and then get them to walk off of it. Whether it's in confession or anger."
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Agreeing, rather than making a point, although Daniel would be forgiven for not being able to differentiate the tone. Who wins literary awards, chronicling the lives of phantoms of a person on their best day? And rarely do people win those awards by trying to win awards. They do it by being built this way.
"Focus on him," back to the lesson, for a moment, "his mind. His scent. We're going to go the long way."
Attract less attention. The mark disappears around a corner, and Armand nudges their trajectory to move out of sight, if in parallel, disappearing through late night traffic, sparse crowds.
"You feel it, when you're getting close. You thrill for it, live for it. Lived," vampire jokes on purpose. "A hunt can feel the same."
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Oh, right. Also learning vampire shit.
He makes an attempt at putting a pin on the man that Armand has lured out of the building with immense sadness (what a way to do it), and at trying to keep part of his awareness there. Multitasking. He loses the man right away, but slows his steps and considers, and ends up finding him again. He does almost bump into a fellow pedestrian walking in the opposite direction as this goes on, but he recovers, walking beside Armand with his hands in his pockets and looking very normal and un-flustered. Yep.
"It's a puzzle that opens a lock." An odd thing to stay about journalism, perhaps. "It's an unraveling. A bang. Takes all kinds. You get there, and then you get to go past there."
The real shit's off the edge of the cliff.
Or!
"Or." ! "Dinner."
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"A peeling back, a luring out." Armand can do both. He prefers the latter when it comes to these kinds of victims, letting them along a path which leads back to himself. His petty cryptofascists are more fun beneath a scalpel.
This, also, he doesn't say. Instead, "Do they appear more human to you, or less? Your puzzles."
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But Daniel is a fast learner, and he cares more about figuring this out and observing what he can about Armand than he does about the morality.
"Now?"
An odd question. He's not sure what to make of it at first, because everything is both more and less human to him, now. More because it's becoming defining. Less because he feels detached. But he figures Armand means before, actually, and is picking at Daniel's process. So. Reverse back for a less stupid response—
"Everybody's a puzzle." This should be a hard truth, about himself. Something that's been used as an accusation, treating the world like an investigation, seeing everyone in terms of a story and relationships as angles. And yet it's just the way he is. Accepted now that he's ruined every romance, every familial tie, every potential life-long friend. "That probably qualifies as appearing less than human. But I usually like people better when they're puzzles."
He shrugs. Distantly, he traces Armand's chosen mark as he moves around barriers to the water's edge.
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There was a time, though, he might have accused Daniel of it. Misanthropy. He prods around for it now, a way in for dehumanisation, a process that will make the hesitations less—but there, Daniel says it. I usually like people better when they're puzzles.
And then, Armand must think of corruption. Will Daniel become someone who takes people apart for fun? Not for chronicling, not for truth, but for the way their blood tastes. Or perhaps he will go away. Start discarding boring people. He thinks of the couple he'd let go, their inane commentary.
"This way," Armand says.
He doesn't call attention to the way he gently nudges people away from the area. A couple hanging out at the railings discard their cigarettes and decide they've had enough, linking arms and leaving. Others, rerouting, or become distracted, turning around, idling. They'll find their mark sitting on the edge of sloped concrete, where boats would be let into the water. Arms tight around his knees, emanating a despair he has never truly felt before, but has always lived within him, he thinks. Rot, plastered over.
Armand stops. They're at a distance to go unnoticed, for now. He doesn't have to explain that if he were to kill this man, he would feel relief. Daniel has already felt it, ill-gotten though it was.
"We shouldn't waste him on me."
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So it's a bit of a bummer to look at this poor fucking guy. He gets it, or at least he thinks he does, but it strikes him that it's already a waste. Armand has godlike power and he uses it to prune a misshapen flower that's already half-wilted instead of an actual invasive weed.
The blood of the dead can pull a vampire down into the grave. They all hear their victims' lives as they die, sung through blood. What do these depressed fucks pull Armand into, time and time again? How is Daniel going to feel draining someone who is, psychologically, half dead already?
He looks at Armand. It's a hard look. Searching. A horrible x-ray of a thing.
Of what he finds there, if anything, he says nothing about.
"Hey," quiet, as he paces over to the man, curled up and half-catatonic. He gets a startled response, gazing up in confusion as a strange old man sits down beside him, hand on his shoulder. Something preternatural enough about Daniel already to hold his attention, and prevent him from casting around for context, from noticing Armand or anything else. A quick exchange that nevertheless, for a moment, seems to stretch on for an eternity. Daniel asks him if he's alright, and the magic of Armand's spell his shattered with a shocked sob, a toyed-with mortal stung by the surprise of random empathy.
Daniel still kills him.
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Maybe a blink out of time once Daniel moves off. An urge to defend himself, which is ridiculous. Daniel had dared him. He chose a single building. Armand does not need to eat every night, not even every week, and he has time to find his perfect invasive weed. This one will simply do. Never mind that Louis has spoken before of what Armand will eat when he can't find his cryptofascists to chase, what Daniel himself has nearly experienced.
He draws in a breath, resettling the book in his arms as he watches Daniel engage with the prey. Feels himself tense as the mortal's world broadens under a show of kindness, like a cracked window. What had Armand expected? That Daniel would repeat his methodology, finish the luring song that has the man slip over the edge into acceptance? No, not really, not on reflection.
And he stays where he is rather than help with clean up, at least not unprompted. After all, didn't he say he wouldn't?
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Louis wanted to know if he considered the life of the rabbit. Vegan bait. Throwing paint on classic works of art, reminding you cows are nice. Stupid. You don't have the rabbit's life beamed into your brain when you cut it.
The man dies and Daniel is sated. Maybe he had skipped a meal. Something bloody, a sick crack, puncturing a lung to disrupt buoyancy. Then an easy lift, a shuffle, a shove, a splash. He runs a hand over his mouth before leaning down to rinse them off— one thing to eat a stranger who smelled like sweat and sadness, another to risk tasting public NYC water. The real horror.
So.
He turns around. Eyebrows up.
"Any notes?"
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"I thought this was my test, not yours," he says. When has he ever felt the need to defend his own killings? He had toyed with Louis and his moralising, engaging in the kind of debate that he assumed Lestat had no patience for, and never felt the need to appear more human to the other vampire. Perhaps it's because Daniel is younger. Because it's because it's Daniel, the ever observant, ever opinionated, or because it's Daniel, who dismantled him, and now he is pieces of himself.
He has no pity in the dead meat now sinking into black waters. His fledgling his fed. For that, he feels satisfied.
"It's only blood." Food, like Claudia said.
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Food, like Claudia said. (More, like everyone else said.)
"It wasn't a test, it was a dare," he reminds him. "And you pulled through, so it's your turn to pick."
Has Armand ever played Truth or Dare? Probably not. Daniel should not be handing him this power. But he just doesn't feel like antagonizing him right now— he has a sense, strangely, that this surreal interaction is plenty, in terms of being a stand-in for needling him about what the fuck he's doing by eating sad people who he's made sadder.
"Doesn't have to be now, now, though." Up the slope. Shoulder to shoulder (and a little lower still, on Daniel's part) in opposite directions.
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