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English
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Published:
2024-08-21
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793
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1/1
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Rabbit Heart

Summary:

In the blood-sky terror of an impending sunrise, Armand whispers, “chase me.”

(The secret is: Armand is a monster but not always a predator.)

Work Text:


The slow, long, terrible work of remembering who he is supposed to be begins as it usually does, chasing the sun down into the dust. 

Louis had not liked to run, but Armand has had movement singing through his blood since before he had a name that meant anything. 

The long held secret of him that has never been captured in ink, in a photograph, in the mind of a lover, not really, not accurately, is that he is not a predator at all. He has only ever been prey. 

Louis used to eat rabbits. 

Play-acting at a human, Armand had once prepared one on a silver platter, watched the creature tremble, tremble, tremble. He watched it when Louis drank. Saw himself reflected back in those glassy dark eyes. 

“I love you,” he had whispered to Louis in the blood-sky terror of an impending sunrise. “I love you, chase me.” 

Louis’ eyes had been more dead than a fallen-prey thing. His mind, intimately familiar and Armand’s favorite place to play, had been a strange tempest of lust and bitter, fire-slick horror. 

“It’s morning,” Louis had said, soft as a snarl. “There’s no time to run, love.” 


He should not be thinking of Louis. 

He is running (away). 

There’s a boy he is hunting, although it is the wrong one. His boy is no longer a boy, no longer alive, no longer a—

The sun is heavy on the back of his neck, a nuisance, making him slow. He enjoys the challenge of it, the way his heels blister, the acrid sting of smoke in the back of his throat, an itch that is different from the hunger. 

Daniel’s blood-song is a wild thing in his sternum, a strange second pulse chasing him deeper and further into a future he doesn’t understand. He ought to keep running. Burn it all down. Maybe go back and burn—

No. 

He kills the boy he is hunting. It is not important. He does not tremble. He is not a rabbit. Armand, over the years, has learned to become something else. Not a boy. Not an art piece. Not a hunted thing. 

Hunting and haunted are different. He is, most often, one and not the other. 

He follows the river of the boy’s thoughts down to the trickle, drinks him dry. The boy tastes like alcohol, and the grease of fried human food, and desperate, horrible loneliness. 

Armand can never bring himself to fully close his mind, so when Louis’ thoughts reach him through the haze of a midnight walk and the incessant chatter of a city street on the other side of the world, he should not freeze. He does anyway. 

What the fuck is wrong with you, Louis says, and Armand’s mouth twitches a little into something that could not be called a smile, but is one of the more honest expressions he has. If he hadn’t asked me not to, I would be—

It is strange, no longer being able to hear Daniel’s mind. Armand thinks back to the lonely boy in San Francisco, the cadence of his thoughts like a frenzied heartbeat, masking the sharp splinter of something darker underneath. Daniel, Armand thinks, has understood what it means to be a monster for far long and far better than most. 

Thank you for taking care of him, he forces himself to think to Louis. You had no obligation. 

Fuck you. 

Louis’ mind is still so easy to grasp. If he wanted, Armand could reach in and—

But no. 

He’s not doing that anymore. Not this time. Not right now. 

 

Daniel’s scent, despite the death and the creature now living under his skin, has not changed. Armand follows the flutter of his second heart back around the world and lingers for a time, watching Daniel stun stupid mortal reporters into silence when they can’t understand his work, watching him hunt in back alleys and in bars, more careful than Louis had been with cleaning up his messes. 

He smells clean, bright, a little like lightning. The spark of something that gets stuck sputtering but can never quite manage to fade. 

Armand steps into his path, a strange symmetry to another meeting, with another love, in Paris so long ago, and says, “hello.” 

Daniel, to his credit, does not jump. He stops walking, blinks their shared amber eyes at Armand slow. “Oh so now you’ve decided to show up?” 

They both know he has been here for a long time. 

Armand’s gums itch. His heels ache. There’s something terrible rising inside his throat he does not have a name for. 

Daniel bares his teeth. Above them both, the street lights flicker out. 

In the blood-sky terror of an impending sunrise, Armand whispers, “chase me.” 

Daniel lunges.