Chapter Text
Daniel orders a new computer from his phone. He shows it to Armand before he hits the purchase button, feeling almost like he’s asking for approval. There’s no need for it; it’s the same model that’s currently lying in pieces in the hallway. But he does it anyway.
Armand doesn’t seem to notice. With the dim, exhausted look that’s taken over his face, Daniel thinks a nuclear bomb could go off outside and he wouldn’t notice. He thinks he could scream or throw something or drop dead and Armand wouldn’t even blink. The one thing he couldn’t do— if the vice grip on his knee is any indication— is leave him alone.
Solitude, as Daniel has learned, is a vampire’s greatest fear. Starvation a close second. Armand has spent his whole life on the brink of both.
He follows him from room to room. He doesn’t speak, and he keeps his distance; but he’s always in sight. A shadow on the wall. When Daniel goes to the bedroom to get dressed, Armand sits on the bed, methodically ripping the edge of his pillowcase to shreds. When Daniel stands at the kitchen counter and works his way through enough prescription pills to make his twenty-year-old self check into rehab again, Armand stands by the microwave. When Daniel moves to the living room to settle onto the couch and read through his emails, Armand curls up on the other end, knees tucked under his chin, arms wrapped around his shins.
They stay that way all night. The vacant look in his eyes remains the whole time: not breathing, barely blinking. A kid lost in the grocery store. A cat hiding under the family station wagon. Waiting for something bigger to come and find him; hit him or run him over, maybe, but find him first.
A few hours in, Armand moves just enough to reach the remote. He turns on competition show reruns, stares at the flashing lights and timers and overemotional car commercials. Neither of them are really paying attention but they’re both grateful for the noise.
Daniel orders delivery from the twenty-four hour Mexican restaurant down the road. It’s been decades since he had a burrito at five in the morning. Maybe revisiting old mistakes is just what he does now.
Armand finally breaks his silence in the middle of an ad for some kind of antidepressant: women who look far too happy strolling down a park path while the disembodied voice of God tells them all the ways they could die. His voice is thin, still dripping with an accent that Daniel doesn’t recognize. It’s so quiet and he stays so still that it’s hard to tell whether he’s using his mouth or his telepathy.
“The first time he…” Armand inhales long and slow, eyes squeezing shut in a grimace. When he opens them again they’ve grown impossibly glassier. “He took me to a party full of men from Florence. I’d just learned what he was. I think he wanted to show off to me. We weren’t invited, but he had spent fifteen hundred years with the Mind Gift at that point. They treated him like an old friend.”
“Did he ever use it on you?” Daniel knows he should sit back and shut up. Someday he’ll be able to turn it off. Maybe when he’s dead, he’ll listen to the other folks in Hell without interrogating them.
“I don’t remember.” A sardonic smile twitches across his mouth— the first sign of life all night. “I suppose that means he did.”
“Rat bastard.”
“My master sits down with them. I don’t. They are all quite drunk, and I know enough at this point to keep my distance from drunk men.”
First person. Present tense. The past encroaching on the future again. Daniel can smell the wine and slow-roasted meat, see the candlelight flickering on the walls.
“They are enamored with me. They always are. Some of them ask where he found me. Then they ask if he’s looking to sell. He doesn’t answer. They start putting money on the table, trying to outbid one another. I don’t know whether they’re joking— or how long Marius will allow them to continue. He calls me over. I come. I am sure he’ll kill them all before they can touch me. He saved me in the brothel. He’ll save me here.”
He falls silent again. As if he could cut history off a little early; as if he could leave Amadeo leaning against the wall of a Venetian dining room, scared but unharmed, forever. Turn away from the gallows before the floor drops out and pretend the execution never happened. For once, Daniel holds his tongue. He doesn't ask what came next. He, too, would be happier if the answer was nothing.
“One of them takes all his rings off, places them in front of Marius. Apparently this is enough.”
Daniel closes his eyes to get away from it, but he still hears laughter and madrigals echoing off the walls of a room twice the size of their whole apartment.
“The man pulls me into his lap. Holds a glass of wine to my lips. I look toward my master. He does not look back. He is talking to the other guests about a battle in Constantinople.”
Armand doesn't explain what the next twenty minutes looked like. But, seemingly against his will or knowledge, flashes of it come to Daniel like bullets in the ribs; an earthquake with a million little aftershocks. He feels the rattle through his skull when Amadeo is bent over the table, held down face to face with a plate of roast songbirds. The thick callouses on the man’s fingers as they maneuver his hips into position. The wooden taste of wine as he's pulled back up by his hair and offered another mouthful.
Daniel doesn't say anything, but something in his posture or expression must change, recoiling at the sheer sensation of it— because all of a sudden it's gone. He's alone in his head again. No more drunkards, no more too-pale eyes smiling down at him. He wishes he could give all the quiet to Armand instead.
“He killed them all. My m— Marius. He pulled the man off of me as soon as he'd finished, drained him dry. Then he bade me watch while he did the same to the others. It was—” his face twists in on itself, contorting into a mask of raw hurt “— a test, I think, of whether I'd put up a fight. I didn't. I never did, when it mattered.”
“You did what you had to,” Daniel says numbly.
“I’ve always remembered it quite clearly. I go there often, in the afternoons.”
“I bet.”
“What I had forgotten, until now, was the abject betrayal of it. Up until that night I believed that he saw me as something…”
“As something.”
“Louis thanked you, when you helped him remember his life with greater clarity. You will forgive me if I don’t do the same.”
Daniel shrugs. “I’m just happy you haven’t ripped my throat out yet.”
Armand laughs once, swallows, rubs his thumb between the knuckles of his forefinger. “He took the payment he'd been offered when we left. And then some. He— well.”
After so many hours of perfect stillness, seeing Armand in motion again is almost frightening. He stands quickly, walks toward Daniel’s office.
“Should I come with you?”
“I’ll just be a moment.”
Daniel hears cardboard scrape against hardwood; heavy thuds as storage containers are dropped to the floor; ceramic and metal clinking together as the contents of a still-packed moving box are sorted through. He watches the TV, listless. A girl is kicked off the show because her cupcakes were too ugly. It’s a dog eat dog world over in the baking industry.
Then he's back, as suddenly and silently as he left. In his hands is a silver jewelry box, its sides carved with intricate reliefs of children playing, kings holding court, a knight mounted on a warhorse. It's beautiful. It's older than the city they're staying in. It makes sense, sitting in his lap.
“No point in hiding these things from you now,” Armand says. There’s a thread of bitterness woven through his voice, but he’s doing his best to obscure it. When he unlatches the lid and lifts it, Daniel thinks of Pandora: the box where everything evil is kept. He pictures Marius hiding inside like a jack-in-the-box.
In the end, all that’s inside is velvet lining and a collection of ancient trinkets. No jumpscares. It’s almost disappointing.
Armand holds up a ring, polished emerald set in gold. Easily worth more than any of Daniel’s doomed wedding bands— not that that's saying much, coming from the guy who paid for his first wedding using savings from washing dishes in a college cafeteria.
“Is that—?”
“What remains of that man’s collection, yes.”
“Not really your style, is it?”
“It was at the time.”
Daniel remembers one of the quotes he marked for the book, from Claudia via her father-brother: we keep the damage so we remember the damage. He interviewed a woman once who kept an empty beer bottle and a ziploc with a couple hairs in it from an ex. DNA evidence, even though the case had gone cold years prior. It wasn't for the cops so much as it was for her own peace of mind; a protective ward against the pitfalls of human memory.
He holds his hand out, palm up. Armand gives him the ring. He’s shaken hands with warmongers and somehow this feels dirtier.
“What happened to the rest of them?”
“The coven members in Rome were steadfast believers in the cleansing properties of fire. Most things did not survive their entry into my life.”
“Marius included.”
“Yes. As far as I know. This—” he nods to the jewelry box “— is what I managed to save from the flames, and hide from the coven during my… induction into their ranks.”
Journalistic integrity left the room back when they were sitting on the slave ship. If Daniel’s being honest, where Armand is involved, it left in the seventies. What remains is a giddy sort of curiosity: it’s that point in the high school relationship where the girlfriend’s mom busts out the family photo albums and goes through the baby pictures while she stands by blushing. The marvel at the realization that the person in front of him had been someone completely different not very long ago, and will likely be completely different not very far from now.
“What else is in there?”
Armand blinks, startled. No one’s ever seen one of his ghosts and asked to see another. “Nothing important.”
Daniel moves closer. Armand lets him. In fact, some of the ever-present tension across his back and along his jaw begins to ease as soon as he's back within the radius of Daniel’s body heat.
“It was important enough to keep for five hundred years.” He puts a hand over Armand’s. Crooked bones and liver spots; smooth skin and sharp nails. There's a scar on the back of his wrist that looks a little like faded rope burn. Daniel traces it with trembling fingers— he wants to know where this one came from, and all the others, too. “Come on, baby. Show me yours and I'll show you mine."