Chapter Text
He wakes in the dark, head pounding and skin coated in the viscous matter of his own decay. His coffin rocks to the rhythmic clip-clop of steady hooves, like a babe in a cradle. He is aware of a dry, searing heat. The stink of burned flesh slinks up his nose like the scent of barbecued pork, alarming in its sulphurous sweet. Once he was alive, then undead, then almost extinguished.
“Louis?” He rasps, whimpering, pathetic, his entire body a blistering boil of heat and unrelenting pain. He is being reborn. He knows this. How did it happen? He opens wild eyes, the pupils trembling uselessly in their sockets.
Someone else had pupils like that. Someone important.
“Daniel,” the reply comes, that familiar slow drawl coloured with relief. Daniel makes a guttural, strangled sound in response, reaching up to grasp, to cling and tear, to feed; hungry, hungry.
“Sshhh,” Louis says, more gently than Daniel remembers from when they were in a penthouse in Dubai, and Louis was more indifferent then, not in a way you could tangibly tell, but in the way those glittering green eyes roved dull and famished over the world. And Daniel could see fewer colours then than he did now, smell less of the dirt and grime of the road, the salty iron tang of vampire sweat.
There’s a soft snick from beside him, teeth going through thin skin. Daniel smells iron and nectar. He latches onto the wrist offered to his lips. The drink, cool and relieving, returns him to sleep.
There is no pain.
Daniel wakes and sheds his old skin like a snake. His head is laid upon Louis’ chest, and he hears the drumbeat then, the synchrony of their hearts thundering wild and fast like the clobbering of hooves over sand, his world swaying behind his closed eyes. The heat is unrelenting, and Daniel’s eyes are drooping in an innate response to morning. They are running away from something, or someone.
It doesn’t matter right now. Louis picks the last of his skin apart, plucks him new and sensitive from the crusted shell of his chrysalis. His new eyelids flutter and unravel like tissue paper over the marbles of his eyes. Unblinking, he stares at his own hands pressed to the dark skin of Louis’ naked chest, his fingers smooth and fine-boned, the sun-spotted wrinkles of his past stretched new and pale over his knuckles. He is young, the way he has not been in almost seventy years. Reborn as the coltish, hungry thing he was then.
I could be your Claudia, but better, he thinks, and almost laughs.
Louis lifts his ragdoll body to the veins of his neck and thumbs his softened jaw open. Daniel latches on, teeth sharpening in response to the burning, heady heat of his blood.
Have you been eating, he thinks desperately, eating ravenously despite himself.
For you, Louis thinks back. I eat, for you.
Daniel had photographed newborn kittens once, and he remembers with fresh horror the wet, slimy creatures latched to the teats of their mother, rooting for food. Louis looks as tender as a bruise pressed against the walls of their rickety caravan, eyes glowing like round, green moons. Whatever’s pulling their caravan speeds up more, and Daniel looks around to find his old coffin gone. The blackout curtains stuck firmly over the windows let in no light and no view, and Daniel knows it’s probably for the better.
Their moving coffin still smells faintly of decay. Daniel licks over the dried blood tracked over Louis’ neck, the warm muscle of his shoulders, the hollow of his throat. He learns the taste of him with the grain of his new tongue, the overwhelming rush of salt and flames that constitute Louis’ flavour. He learns the texture of Louis’ skin, softer than anything he’s felt yet in this reincarnation; the spikes of his stubble rubbing like tiny pinpricks over Daniel’s cheek. Louis shudders softly, each muscle tensing in response to Daniel’s slow exploration. Daniel studies the ghost of goosebumps over Louis’ arms, the curious hardening of his nipples when he breathes over them. He pushes his face into that chest, breathing hard, almost overstimulated by all of it.
And then Louis is pressing him boldly to the flimsy wooden walls of their makeshift coffin and Daniel is watching his beautiful eyes flare like small solar storms. Louis kisses him, soft and then hard and then harder, with teeth. And Daniel remembers this, remembers doing it before; but the sensation of it is so freshly intense he finds himself weeping. Louis laps up the blood of his tears, presses more kisses to his eyes, his cheeks, his limp, quivering lips. Daniel dimly notes the humiliation burning in his chest, but it doesn’t stop him from kissing back, kitten soft and wanting, letting Louis in, letting him have what he wants.
He’d married twice when he was alive, he remembers that now. And Daniel had wished each time that he could tear open his own being at the altar like a sacrifice; like he could offer up the acerbic, grating shell of his words, the perverse nature of his longings, in turn for someone who would choose him, love him, keep him.
Louis’ hands feel like electricity against his unblemished, infant skin, and the girth of his member feels wide enough to break Daniel open once more, to crack him open like an egg, his shell gossamer-thin, translucent.
Here is his altar. Here is his coffin. And there, there, his immortal body spread open under his lover, making noises this body had never made before, screaming and wailing at every touch, every jolt and tender thrust, every brush of teeth and tongue, until the very fabric of existence unravels before his eyes.
Good boy, Louis thinks at him. My good, good boy.
“Where are we?” Daniel asks at last, when they are both sated and the press of Louis’s thumb against his wrist no longer sends him reeling for breath.
“We’re safe from him,” Louis says vaguely, fingers curling tighter over Daniel’s wrist.
It comes to him then, abrupt and brutal as a landslide.
Armand, his maker. His orange eyes vibrate in Daniel’s own; his quiet, apocalyptic rage that turned the muggy summer air static. Was it ten years ago? Twenty? A century? He remembers the rundown townhouse in West Virginia, the soul-crushing humidity dripping from the walls, mould caking the wallpaper in dark clumps. Daniel could smell the restless nights from strangers’ jizz coating the unwashed blankets kicked hastily into a corner, the smell of sex and salt. Armand came. Armand reached for him; and Daniel remembers – he remembers his kneecaps hitting the floor, breaking and healing in an instant. Armand’s fingers in his hair, Armand’s fingers around his throat, ripping out his windpipe, taking the air from his lungs like a lustful, desperate thing. Armand kissing him soft and then brutally hard, drawing blood, and then lapping it up like an apology. Armand whispering slow and seductive no one will have you like a curse, and then disappearing into the dark like a shadow, like a ghost come to haunt, and when Daniel was younger he’d hunted the devil but he didn’t know it would be like this – that the devil would be both cruel and pitiable; that he could be so pathetic and yet so enticing in his beauty; that Armand could be capable of hurting him so much without destroying him as he so easily could.
Armand came in the dark, half-crazed orange eyes vibrating in their sockets, and Daniel remembers his lips mouthing Louis over and over and over into Daniel’s fledgling skin, like a broken record, like he’d wanted it to hurt.
“Where is he?” Daniel asks, pathetically soft. “He is well?”
Louis’ lips thin further. He gathers Daniel closer, settles him onto his lap. “He is far away.”
It is unknown how long they spend on the road. It is unknown when they finally pause for breath, when they unstick their ichor-stained shirts from their skins and wring it for residual nourishment, the taste of dried blood flakes clinging to Daniel’s teeth like licking the coating from old, oxidised copper coins. The days blur together like burning sand between Daniel’s fingers, like memory in an hourglass, slip-sliding from one bulb to another through a strangulating neck pinched tighter and tighter until it stops entirely.
Something dies within Daniel in that long, protracted heat; in the days that don’t end but also never begin. Louis leaves him alone for days at a time, languishing to dust below ground, mind clamouring for sustenance but body too weak to comply. He closes his eyes to darkness. Opens his eyes to darkness. Blinks in the green candlelight of Louis’ eyes, torch-bright in the unlit halls of an abandoned mine. There is nothing here. No windows and no doors, and the heavy weight of earth weighing down the flimsy structure of these manmade halls. Daniel stinks of metal dust and dynamite. He stays there so long he becomes combustible, explosive in his rage and despair. He yells into the long, echoing halls as loud as he can, alone and trapped as his young, unfamiliar self, his voice higher and clearer than he remembers. He screams and screams until he grows hoarse. Kicks the walls viciously with his smooth, colt-thin legs, breaking an ankle, a hip, all his knee ligaments, gritting his teeth as they crawl back into place like worms beneath his skin, eating him out hollow. He dares the earth to collapse over his head, to bury him within its depths like it had countless others. The mine is a place for dead, rotting, abandoned things. Things that won’t ever again see daylight.
Louis brings back men and women glazed in the eyes, stumbling soft and willing to Daniel’s fangs. He brings back Latino men, whispers Spanish lullabies as they come to sleep; brings heavy-set white Californians to Daniel’s lips, singing the word rest like he means it, like saying it makes a difference to himself. None of them are blonde, and that means something even if Daniel cannot remember what.
The mine continues to stand ironically solid and still over his head, and Daniel finds the strength to crawl out above ground one night, and stay until the sky turns as pink as Alice’s favourite dress, the sun so close to cresting over the horizon he can feel his skin beginning to flake away.
Daniel wakes and he is still undead.
Louis kisses the blood from his cheeks. They have been here too long, he says. They will try something else.
Two young sailors working the nightshift join a great big cruise all the way to Tokyo, sleeping the days away and keeping the alcohol flowing all night. A young widow or twelve jump over the railing and drown, drunk off their heads, and no one cares enough to stop them. Middle-aged businessmen cheat on their wives for the thrill of promised deviance and die mid-coitus, the taste of cocaine electrifying in their blood, and if anyone notices they are inclined to think he had it coming.
They are on a great glittering hulk of a ship parting the waves of the Pacific Ocean, and Daniel tastes the salt and sulphur on the winds, freer than he has perhaps ever been, more unknown than he has been in almost half a century. The horizon is a quivering blue line reaching forevermore in either direction and the stars at night envelope him, the sky as suffocating as the softest darkest pillow shoved up against his face. He could disappear like this. It is a terrifying, awful thought.
Daniel had always liked cities. The franticness of a million thudding hearts, angry people shoving past each other in the maze of countless streets and alleys, and nearing dawn, the drunken desolation of glaring electric lightbulbs illuminating men and women dragging their leaden bodies home. And Armand, standing still against the glass of a New York apartment, limpid eyes looking out over the rush and roar of the city even past midnight, his thoughts as evasive as they always were.
Had Daniel still been human, then? Or had he been Fledgling-Lover, Companion-Replacement? Too young to understand him, and too old to look the part.
Louis looks charming in a sailor’s costume. He has the forearms for the job, the face and lips to tempt men and women both to sin. Still unable to divorce himself from humanity, still wearing his genteel mask like a bizarre sort of customer service, bloodlust sheathed behind pearly smile, predator twisting himself into a caricature of prey. Daniel trails after him, a longing, wraith-like thing. He looks too young to speak as acerbically as he does, too fresh-faced to be as bitter as he is, too damn unfriendly to the rest of the staff when they get it to their heads he owes them respect.
Daniel eats the most annoying ones. The sailors fear him, then, and they should. They turn to their captain, a portly, good-natured man who turns pale at the glimpse of Daniel’s sharp incisors, there and gone when he grins at him. He is thinking about his wife and children at home. He is thinking he could stand to sacrifice a few men to return home safely. It takes so pitifully little to bend the morality of any human. The captain smiles shakily back at him. No one is sacked, though several men quietly resign at the next port, never to be seen again.
Daniel is a predator, and unlike Louis he has never found need to hide it.
Daniel grows sick of the glittering opulence of the cruise ship much faster than Louis does. Louis is fascinated by the indoor pool with the hot tub at the side, the art lining the gaudy halls, the fucking chandeliers swaying romantically to the beat of the waves. He still abstains too much from feeding, but when he does eat he likes to comment on the joy thrumming through the blood, and the riveting quality of the alcohol consumed.
It’s the most annoying thing Daniel has ever had the misfortune to endure.
“That’s a good, complex red,” Louis says, smacking his lips as he casually tosses the limp body of his dinner overboard. “Great balance, lingering finish.”
“Shut the fuck up, Louis.” Daniel snaps, crabby and annoyed with blood still sloshing in his stomach, comically bloated and stuck in a body too young to truly be his own.
His listlessness had reached a violent peak, and he’d drunk four men dry tonight alone, leaving Louis to clean up after him. Where Daniel is beginning to recover his full strength, Louis has grown thin and drawn despite his obvious delight in being among humans once more. It makes something in Daniel curdle to see it, makes him seethe with rage. Where was this morality when he’d fed Daniel those Californian men and women, sung them all to a pretty death? No one could protect Louis from himself.
“You get seasick or something?” Louis scoffs, avoiding his gaze.
“Damn right I’m sick. This damn boat’s rocking the whole time. We’ve got a whole feast right here and all you want to talk about is the wine and the fucking hors d'oeuvres they’re serving for the food.” Daniel regrets it almost as soon as the vitriol rips itself past his open mouth, panting with the force of it.
Louis blinks at him, struck.
The ocean’s all black and blue around them, and Louis’ eyelashes look so unfairly long backlit by the ship’s fancy torches. His necktie is loose tonight, his dark skin a sharp contrast to his starched white shirt. Daniel can see the hollow of his throat, the bob of his Adam’s apple when he swallows.
“Sorry,” he murmurs. “Mostly gotten used to the rocking, anyway.”
“I can tell you been thinking a lot,” Louis says, leaning out over the taffrail to stare at the choppy waves dashing viciously against the hull. The man he’d just disposed of floats up above the surface, mouth lax and blue eyes unblinking. He looks, Daniel thinks, like a dead fish. Is a dead man hungry for life any more than the waves are hungry for flesh?
“What about it?” Daniel sighs. This is not a conversation he wants to have, but if he’s honest it had been a long time coming.
“There is a substance,” Louis says. The propellers are whining so loudly Daniel can barely hear his voice.
“What?”
I found a private shipment of a substance very similar in composition to LSD, Louis says directly in his mind.
Daniel almost jumps with the unexpectedness of it, glaring mildly back. There’s no need to be dramatic.
Louis smiles, softening visibly. He strokes a finger down Daniel’s arm, pressing a kiss to his blood-swollen cheek. “I believe it might have properties conducive to… retrieving deeply buried memories, so to speak.”
Daniel shifts closer to him, curious now. “Oh? Is the old man returning to his drug habit?”
Louis smirks, smug as anything. “I don’t know, is he?”
And not to worry, he adds. Its owner won’t have much use for it anymore.
Daniel laughs, and laughs, and Louis kisses him as the planned weekly fireworks burst into the boundless dark sky, and the guests cheer raucously amongst the explosions raining slow and soft into the turbid waters.