followups | way down we go.

"Rashid wasn't meant to engage in conversation."

He was being in character.

And the next exhale comes heavier at the feeling of Daniel's hand, exploring, touching, holding. Rewards this act of reaching for him with the slightest insistent shift inwards of his hips, before following impulse, pressing the cap on the bottle to open. There, a casual spilling of liquid down onto his cock, Daniel's hand, enough for some to leak through, smear on abdomen, inner thighs.

"It was, in part, a game for myself and Louis," admittedly. Yes, utility, a means of monitoring the interview and preserve his anonymity while they got their bearings, but they didn't have to do all that. Armand, wrapping his hand around the top of the bottle, tipping it to fill his palm, grease his fingers. "But it quickly became something else."

Surreal and electric to be able to talk about this now, the drama and hurt of the incidents around it laid to something resembling rest. It feels like evolution. Daniel strokes him, getting the slippery substance all over, doing a better job at just feeling him than efficiently coating him. Knowing it's Armand makes him twitch in eager sympathy.

(What if they'd fucked in 1973? A horror story. But...)

"What'd it become?"

He can guess. Distractions in both directions, when Armand took off his disguise. He thinks the elder vampire was supposed to be keeping tabs on him, and instead found himself involved in checking in on Daniel's increasingly inappropriate curiosities. He was mostly focused on the interview, sure, a dogged workaholic who loves nothing more than the angle, but he would look up and find Armand staring at him.

Armand barely snaps the bottle back shut before it's abandoned on the covers, an edge rising against the velvet warmth of sensation as Daniel gets him slick. Coaxes blood through veins, the sense of his own pulse.

"Baiting your curiousity," he says. Gets his hand between them, smearing his palm broad along Daniel's cock. Momentary, before tucking in between his legs. "Your attention from the task at hand." From Louis. "It was stupid of me. You were going to start remembering."

But he wanted it, just a little, beneath the stone tower of certainty that he didn't want it, that it would be ruinous. Some part of him buried deep that wanted to be ruined.

The press of his fingers, gentle. No sharp bits, somehow. Not going slowly, just methodically.

His breath catches at the touch, marveling at being hard again this fast. He laughs sometimes to himself, this feeling, getting younger. The vampire experiences is probably supposed to be the cognitive dissonance of the opposite. Then Armand's hand moves, and Daniel takes a steadying breath. He knows how to do this. He did this plenty, just most often on his knees one way or the other. The potential intimacy of eye contact during fucking is as terrifying as it is exciting.

"You wanted me to see you."

There, in the present, in Dubai. In the past, in his mind. Even if it was dangerous and it was going to lead to a fucking nuke. It sends a shiver up Daniel's spine, to think of Armand risking his entire life collapsing just to get Daniel's attention.

"Didn't I always?"

Even at the fucking bar. Even all the way back at Polynesian Mary's. He looked up from laughing with Louis, struck by his looming partner. Easy enough in those days, typical of gay couples, everyone just having fun. Free love. But he was still caught for a second, like a fish on a hook. Another steadying breath, letting Armand do this.

Did he always? Armand tips his head, studying him now—with a hand braced on a thigh, encouraging it open, and his fingers burying themselves slow. A long, raking look, right down to the current arrangement between them.

Asking Daniel if he thinks the vampire bond is what draws them together. Wondering if a week's worth of torture is what made him fascinating to the fascinating boy, even when he didn't remember it. Tonight, he is in the mood to enjoy these realities, and the attraction between them in spite of-because of. There will be plenty of time to pick at it, fret at it.

Or maybe not. Maybe he will distract himself with Daniel every time. Encourage scalding truths and affirmations both.

Working him, slowly but surely, gently but ceaselessly. The scrape of vampire claws a sensation that doesn't push past into pain and damage. He has practice. Thinks of a good place to score, I did what I had to, and asks, "Do you like that?" in the hush tone of bedroom talk, the intensity of curiousity.

Daniel looks back, meeting the searing gaze, letting Armand see everything he wants. Staring back into him at the same time. Closed to each other, but connected. Everything else has well and truly fallen away. Vampires, hostilities, wounded friends, the whole fucking world. Like it did every so often before the bond was there at all.

Does he like this?

He's not an incoherent mess. Despite the allegations he wasn't a closest twink shaking and gagging for it. Just a regular closeted weirdo. It was good sometimes and bad other times. He'd hoped it would happen with Louis, he wanted it even if it would have been bad. Be careful what you wish for, and all that. Since it went real fucking bad.

"Yeah." The real answer. Holding himself so still, hyper-aware of the intrusion into his body and the potential for harm. It makes him nervous, which makes it hotter. Long past the point of pretending fear isn't tangled up with sex, for him. It's the intensity, he thinks. Always looking for the inescapable, inevitable feeling. Never able to find it honestly, so looking for it through risk, instead. "You've got pretty good aim with those." A slight tremor in his voice; Daniel's eyes fall closed for a moment, face scrunched up. The deep ache slowly spiraling out from that point of connection, catching him suddenly in its current.

The mechanics of this touch shift from the coaxing of muscle to relax and the slicking of flesh, to the pursuit of something a little more deliberate. Watching Daniel with unearthly intent as fingers stroke, prod, feeling the temptation of hot-tightness like a hand on his cock. A small breath of a laugh, a show of teeth. No fangs. No blown out pupils.

But humanlike desire, forcing his mouth to part, his eyes to hood. Good, he thinks. Progress being made, on finding out what Daniel likes. In general, or with him. What he might learn he likes. If Armand had his fangs in him, maybe he could pick up on that little hint of nervousness.

Thinks he can, anyway, and it doesn't feel unwelcome. Maybe there will come a time when he no longer makes Daniel nervous. He should enjoy it while it lasts.

Slowly, easing his fingers out, letting himself be felt as he does so. That hand immediately straying to his own cock, squeezing himself near the base, a checking kind of action. Daniel, laying open and willing to him, letting him have it all. Strokes himself, and replaces that previous twinge of his fingertips with the blunter presence of the head of his cock, rubbing himself there as he shifts to balance over Daniel, a hand braced by his shoulder.

Just when his fingers are starting to feel really good, Armand pulls them away. Something about that seems typical, even though this has never happened before. Nerves return, and he chides himself internally that he's too old to feel like that, no matter how long it's been, no matter who it's with.

Armand, shifting. Armand pressing against him, that's his cock, hard and so, so fucking present, all slicked up, Armand over him, pressing him back, caging him in. Daniel instinctively wants to participate but this position makes it difficult, gives Armand total power over him, and his thoughts flinch to 1973 again, and Armand trying to convince him that death would be better than routine, absentminded missionary sex with a someday-wife.

Ha ha. Maybe death is better. Even though this is still missionary.

"Yeah," he breathes. One hand circling fingers around Armand's wrist at his shoulder, not restricting him, just a point of contact, the other a mirrored hold on his shoulder. Yeah.

At some point, Armand will have to experiment with Daniel's patience. See how long he can linger at the entryway before being invited in, so to speak. Begged in. A touch of that impulse here, but it doesn't last—he wants it too much, and so, as he feels Daniel's fingers wrap around his wrist, as he continues to watch his face, Armand sinks inside of him in a long, patient stroke of movement.

Not quite bottoming out but close, pressing close, enough to satisfy the itch that had wanted so much to feel Daniel pressed around him this way. The alluring resistance of muscle, the appealing way it yields, has to yield. Breath caught.

His hand darts from the base of his cock to Daniel's hip, his thigh, then chest, little careless smears of slickness as he feels him, testing the different points of contact he may wish to grip. Palm smoothing down to his side to settle there, claws dimpling skin.

Doesn't begin to fuck him. Waits, then pushes in deeper, until he is buried. As keyed into the sensation as he is in watching.

Not unlike fangs in him. The mechanics of penetration are all over this fucking life (this fucking, life). Stitching them together, piercing skin and drawing it tighter. He wonders what their tapestry will look like someday. Also, this feels crazy. Like every time he gets fucked, his first thought it always Why am I doing this, this is a terrible idea, but he forces himself to stay still and relaxed, and experiences a rush of euphoria for being able to. No strain, no cramps, no tremors. And he's staring right at the monster who made it possible in the first place.

Armand sinks in further and Daniel's hand scramble to touch him, shifts then doesn't, tries to figure out where to arrange himself. Remembering, not remembering at all, because his brain is being re-arranged by a vampire's dick. (You're a vampire, too, remember?) (Right, sure.)

One knee up, restless, rubbing the inside of his thigh against Armand's side, hand flexing on his shoulder. A deep breath in, out. He stares up at Armand, and paradoxically feels like he's falling.

"It's been so fucking long I don't actually remember if this is what it feels like," is a weird thing to say, maybe? There's fuzzy logic. Not sure if he's making sense. "Or if it's just you."

A shaky breath out for the feeling of Daniel trying to adjust to him, the wandering up of his knee and scrabble of hands, a long breath in. Feels powerful for it, allows himself to enjoy the feeling, even though Armand is certain he is moments away from his own scrabbly sense of desperation. That it's probably already visible in his expression.

"It's just," he starts, panting already. Trying again. "It's just bodies, Mr. Molloy." A gleam of teeth, and maybe his canines are sharper now. Drawing back, pushing in, still adapting. "Just blood, just. Friction, and tension. Just neurochemistry, electricity."

Does he believe that? Probably he has, previously. He hasn't said Mr. Molloy since, when, possibly Dubai? Maybe a sarcastic echo later on.

It shouldn't feel like distancing. Not when he is beginning to fuck him this way, and his hand catches desperately at Daniel's hip, and his eyes are as bright as hearth coals. Teasing, perhaps. Challenging, even now. Being insane, as standard.

Fuck Daniel feels incredible. Made to be fucked by him, even.

Mr Molloy, and Armand trying to play it cool while his breath is coming so much quicker, driving slowly in and out of him. Daniel feels something in him tighten and twitch, every nerve keying in to the feeling of this, hitting the threshold of where fingers started to feel good and going past it into much, much better.

"Purely mechanical?" Breathless. Voice scraping deeper as everything coils in him, and he finds the ability to engage in something besides mindless grasping. "Yeah, I get it. Like that."

(Metronomic, my Rashid / Counting down your thrusts)

"You push in, and the pressure around your dick feels good, and it goes over all my nerve endings to reach the anterior position of a gland that feels good in me, and you pull back, and we both want to fucking die from the removal of it, so you push back in. Hormones change. The brain says, I like that."

Daniel's eyes are almost yellow. Sweat on his temples, his throat, his chest. He is a writer, but he's never tried erotica. Too blunt for it.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Yes it does."

Nothing wrong with mechanics. Blood pressure and nerve endings and secretions and the vacuum of pleasure with each withdraw, filling it again with a shift of muscle and bone that won't tire no matter how long Armand chooses to keep Daniel here, folded beneath him. Realises his gaze as wandered and reorients it towards golden irises and jetblack pupils, the shimmer of blood-tainted moisture on Daniel's brow.

This is better. Better than erotica, flowery prose, professions of love and passion. Dissection, revelation. No need to make something what it isn't when it is already good. At least, not today.

Armand's fangs pressing against his lip, visible when he curls it. No known reason to him why his never seem as wolfishly long as most others, even in the midst of a hunt rather than just love making, but they do the job. Probably hurts more, anyway.

Shifts his hands, or reaffirms them. A grasp at Daniel's hip, keeping him still. The one near his shoulder settles on it, bracketing him close. Like, let's test this theory, before moving—the slow, adjusting motions resolving into something real, and the initial earnest impact between them punching a sound of Armand even as he does it.

Just mechanics, when they're each who they are, when they're staring at each other face to face for it. Armand inside of him, brute force physicality and not just his blood. Daniel drags in his breaths and looks up at his maker, his beautiful, fucking bizarre eyes that mirror his own in their coloring, his hauntingly pretty face, the lovely pinprick teeth that made him.

Armand bears down on him and Daniel almost chokes with it, sensations he hasn't felt in ages raking through him like electricity. He squeezes Armand's wrist, rakes his other hand down his chest to reach between them and feel where his cock is pushing into him, obscene and slick, and then he has to grab his hip, nails denting skin. He's hard, which is a bit of a shock, feeling the weight and heat of it between them— good, ridiculously so.

He's going to say something else. Some mechanical, daring bullshit, but as he opens his mouth (tips of his own canines elongating, just a little) he becomes suddenly aware of the thing binding them together. How it feels. That silver thread and the way he can sometimes sense Armand's mood or his presence, and how fucking overwhelming it is in this moment.

"Yeah," another echo, the most coherent he can be. Armand is holding him still but he digs a heel into the bed and pushes into him, more, fuck.

It's not mechanical, he thinks, the pleasure he feels for that moment of resistance. Daniel's heel against the mattress, muscles pushing back as if to take him deeper and faster, strong and alive. As vital as he was when Armand took him into his arms (both times) and bit his throat (both times)—

No, more. Not the quivering, sacrificial thing. Something else, something he has made, touching him intimately and clutching around his cock and only struggling so he can get more of it.

Armand does that, burying in and pressing down. Long arms sliding around, pushing in between bed and back, shoulders. Their proportions makes this easier, a vampiric tolerance for the strain of mobility and the demands being imposed on Daniel's body that allows Armand to have him like this as well as snake up a hand to find a handful of silver curls and coax Daniel's head back.

Because he wants to drink from his throat. Wants that sense of submission, of repeat, of demand. Armand pressing his mouth against the side of it, hot breath and warm tongue and lips felt first in open mouthed kiss.

There's an easy and weightlessness of moving that shocks him, feeling less human than ever and liking it, experiencing a momentary hysterical thought for how he could have ever thought he was properly alive before— quickly scattered away under the force of how good this feels. It's so easy to shift into the perfect angle and hold there, grind back against every snap forward, and he fucks right into where it feels best and Daniel thinks, oh, okay, this is what getting fucked is supposed to feel like. Kind of insane he's figuring it out at this age. But he's not going to complain.

Nails dig into Armand's back, a kneejerk impulse, and he shudders and flattens his palms out, not sure if this hurts or not, if Armand would like it either way, if, if, if, fuck.

He tips his head back, sees Armand, the ceiling, some other fucking universe of sensation. A shudder when he kisses his throat, heart hammering. He was out of his mind and near death the first time, he did die the next time. He'd asked for this, and for Armand to decide to take it like this—

Yes. It's what he wants. He feels like he's high. He feels better than that.

Something obscene in the way saliva gathers in his mouth, a genuine instinctive hunger paired with this other kind of desire. A breathy groan pressed against Daniel's throat, feeling the other man strain for this, arch for it.

A far cry from the defeated acceptance of his prey. Of former lovers, even.

Fangs, piercing skin. As painful as that should be, as numbing as it swiftly becomes, and then as pleasurable as it had been before of blood gently coaxed through broken pathways under the force of a monster's appetite. Armand humming his pleasure at the taste of blood coating his tongue, filling his mouth, allowing it to well up messily beneath his mouth before more earnestly drinking it down.

And none of it detaches himself from what he is doing. From being buried deep in Daniel and holding their bodies pressed close together, feeling the shape of Daniel's cock pressing against his belly, the heave of his breathing. All of these sensations, amplified even, at the steady intake of warm blood.

The shock of pain is good, heightening the contrasting pleasure for the interruption, and this time Daniel doesn't have the presence of mind to avoid clawing at Armand. Getting fucking, being bit, his cock moving him, body over him, blood moving like silk over his nerves and veins out into his maker. It slams him into the line of what he thought was as much as he could handle, and then slingshots over it, another realm past human experience.

Pretty fucking cool, might be his eloquent writer's note about it later. Keeping himself from waxing too poetic.

But if there's any transfer of feeling in blood-drinking, now that Armand is doing it with such intent, Daniel can't hide from sentimentality whirling out of ecstatic control. Armand drives him crazy. As comfortable to be around as he is frustrating, fascinating, that lit dynamite word, Daniel sees him sitting cozily and sketching something, he sees him with eyes blazing as he drains someone, he envisions himself reaching out to him in the mist of the kind of horror that should break him and pressing into him for a kiss.

This post-life has been good. He's glad it was Armand.

There it is, again. That thing that hooked in him the first time he drank from Daniel like this, only amplified. Love is not the word he is looking for, he has started to feel doubtful for its efficacy, having involved himself in more love stories than he'd ever cared to experience. Having been told he is loved before.

No, this is different, more specific. Addicting, addiction. Sentiment and lust together, something in Daniel that craves something more vital in Armand than just Armand's behaviours, his abilities, his tasks, his duties. Presentations, personas, names, faces. Down, down, to where he had felt there was nothing.

How it hurt, to feel each thing torn aside, and so ruthlessly. How good it feels.

Blood runs, escaping past his teeth, streaking down Daniel's neck, into his hair, over his shoulder, on his sheets. Vampire skin will knit itself together, and Armand kisses away the excess as if he would prefer to bathe in it. Hot panting against Daniel's cheek, in the moment he resumes fucking him, his breath shaking.

Monster. Maker. A creature bonded to him for eternity; a creature that's turned Daniel into a monster, too. But being a monster feels more correct. He feels like himself. Through death, Armand didn't just make Daniel a vampire, he made him real.

Nothing damned could feel this good. No clearer proof to him that heaven and hell aren't real than his maker fucking him and spilling his own blood everywhere, hot and liquid and smelling like both of them— a part of him is always tainted just so with Armand, now, his life having filtered entirely through the ancient being in magic transformation.

Crazy that it's the bite that's going to do it. The feel of his blood, Armand re-arranging his insides, the fact that he can keep up with it and the only pain is from their sharpest edges. He wants to drown in it, choke in it. Daniel rakes claws down his back to grab at him, encourage him to take more, take what he wants, take everything. He is on the edge of shattering. When he kisses him, it's a badly aimed mess that scrapes the softest parts of his maker's mouth with fangs.

Claws in his back, his ass, his hips. Drawing white lines, his fledgling beading blood to the surface of his skin, a scrambling desire that feels sharper for the way Armand feels so close to satisfied. Lazily turns his head to meet that kiss, gives a small hiss at where fangs catch against his lip. More blood. Only answers it by kissing Daniel back deeply, bearing down.

If there is some removed part of him, it's barely a sliver, the rest of Armand too present for the kinds of dissociative analysis that he has often made room for, retreated to. This tiny part of him, observing the side this brings out in Daniel. Clawing and demand and desire, naked desire, unmediated. Not unfamiliar. They can be so cynical, sometimes, but honest too.

But enough of that. Armand has the briefest urge to tell Daniel he's about to come, some twisted up thing that is both seeking permission and giving apology, and ultimately too far gone to do anything but sink into this role of taking he has begun, that Daniel encourages with words, with hands and teeth. Grasps a hold at the base of Daniel's throat, the curve of his shoulder, kiss breaking in the moment, mouth red and wet with blood and spit.

Claws sinking in. Doesn't pause his rutting. Even the abstract part of him looking on doesn't give him a helpful reminder to see to Daniel's pleasure.

He told Armand to have everything, and he meant it. No point in doing any of this shit halfway. Armand accepted Daniel's graceless up front refusal to play maitre, so he's holding up his end of the bargain, giving everything over. (Would he like to fuck Armand? Yes. Christ, yes. That's not the point.)

It's rough and probably more than would be comfortable for a mortal, but none of that matters, because neither of them are human. It just sends him spinning higher, dragging in labored breaths, heart hammering, everything good, good, fuck, good, better, perfect.

Armand looks demonic. Like he did when he was torturing him. Daniel thinks he might climax from feeling him this way, looking like that. Clings to him, blood boiling, shuddering, holding him tightly through it. Hands slide up Armand's back, holding him, up to cradle his head and stroke his hair. Nerves twitch all through him, still hard, still right there. But hanging on the edge feels good, and knowing he brought Armand over feels even better.

Finally slows as the last of it wrings out of him, as Daniel's arms go around him, hold him, fingers through his hair. Too tempting to collapse into it, some structural integrity giving way as he goes still on top of Daniel, clinging to him. Driftwood in choppy waves, and an endless depth beneath his feet.

The scent of blood, sweat, sex everywhere, the whole world condensed down to the tangle they have made of each other. Aware of Daniel's hardness, still, and likes that too, the feel of it against his skin, signalling mutual desire, gratification.

In a moment. He wants to be held.

He doesn't think he wishes to cry, exactly, but this fullness of feeling resembles the urge. Pressing its hands against his ribcage from within, pushing. Catches his breath. Not quite his mind. Returns his mouth to Daniel's healing bite, kissing and licking away the last of the blood drying there. "Tell me," murmured. "Tell me how you want it now."

Daniel feels pinned in place on a high crest, maddening and relaxing at once. He holds Armand, feeling strangely protective in the midst of everything else. This monster made him, hurt him, and he understands it.

A shivery sigh after that kiss, as Armand tastes lingering blood. Still pushed inside of him, even softening, makes everything light up. Armand's weight feels good, his dick feels good, his mouth, his fangs, all of it. Daniel licks blood-tinted sweat at his temple.

"My hand over yours," he answers. Nudges the side of his face, presses a kiss to half of his mouth. "Just like this."

They don't have to move. Wedge between their bodies, he just wants Armand to touch him. He'll even do the work, fingers wrapping over his maker's on his cock.

A nod, more felt than seen, Armand allowing his hand to be found, moved, wrapped around Daniel's stiff cock. Squeezing, a covetous kind of touch, before relaxing, and drawing in a breath as he feels Daniel moving them together.

Allows it, allows Daniel to do what he needs. His fingers make a narrow passage to fuck through, attentive in this way, but otherwise he settles where he is, nuzzled in against the side of Daniel's neck and face, eyes half-closed and out of focus. A very human feeling, this kind of daze. Unprofessional. Luxurious to linger in. He had always been fond of this part, the after.

Although not quite after, not yet. Lifting his head, eventually, watching Daniel now, hazily hooded but focused, burning gold. His face, first, then down, the configuration they make, the swollen-needy colour of his cock in their hands together, the press of lifted thighs, wiry silvered hair, the long line of muscle running from wrist to elbow. Every little detail, all of it, possessively collected.

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