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A comfortable chair.
A room that slants to the north.
An easeful death.
Rest.
Rest.
In the pitch depths of the night, three and a half years after the chase had begun, they were almost comfortable with each other. The chase was now a game, running an option, but hardly a requirement. They knew each other well. Habits. Patterns. When one would wake, when the other would rest. When a plane ride would be taken by day as if it were a red eye, with noise-cancelling headphones to drown out the cries of infants and the chatter of families who had not been forced into nocturnality. Favorite foods, preferred victims, pastimes, mindless exploration. They knew each other like books read through again and again. Scripts memorized and never forgotten.
But this, pleasant as it had been, would never last. And Armand had been keenly aware of the delicate lilting more dramatically from side to side in their most recent months. Now was the time, before his mind was irreversibly changed and the boy before him was no longer seen as another fascinating mortal. His hands rested upon the sides of Daniel’s neck, drawing him close, like a mother holding an infant to her bosom to suffocate their cries. Daniel was equally frantic and entranced, and the tears in his eyes marked something hopeful and horrified.
Rest.
This is it, isn’t it? You’re finally going to kill me?
Rest, Daniel.
Armand’s delicate and cold hands tilted his head to the side. Cold, because he’d starved himself, because if he was full and the blood was not appetizing he wouldn’t have been able to do it. He needed to starve, so he would lose himself in his mortal meal and forget about the soul he held past the fact that it longed for death as desperately as it did immortality, and that he would bring an easeful death, a comforting death, to the boy he so cared for.
Cradling hands, then fangs, sunk into the soft flesh at the side of the neck and drawing slowly upon the pulsating stream of hot blood. He’d sipped from Daniel before, little drinks while lost in the throes of passion. It tasted then as sweet and rich as it had before, as alluring and satisfying as the taste of his tongue during a kiss, or the taste of his finish prompted by Armand’s tongue and delicate hands. He needed this. It needed to be this way.
But then, why were there tears? Why did he feel the building ache in his throat and behind his eyes, the release of a relentless stream of tears tinted red by the blood that kept his body going. Why did he weep when he wished to moan, when he felt full and bold and he felt the thrum of Daniel’s heart dulling to a slow rhythm, a hopeless beat.
His eyes, through their blood-fogged tears, lifted to gaze out the northern window. Their color, an auburn brown swimming with red and gold in their preternaturality. Their focus on the pitch black horizon, which would be flooded by sunlight within the hour. And then his mind on why he had chosen that time, in particular, to commit the sin he could not come back from. Through Daniel he had known love. Through Daniel, he had felt whole in ways he had not known were possible. He could not live without this boy in all of his mortality living by his side. The sun would cleanse him of what he had done. If he laid beneath it it would still burn his blood, even after five hundred years.
A second bite, more desperate. Clinging to Daniel like a beast whose meal was threatened. His tongue, lapping at the wound as if he could heal it. The pull of his heart hardly there now, a weak line to life that could so easily be snapped.
Then Armand, pulling away. Trembling hands holding onto Daniel’s face as he bit at his own bottom lip, his eyes alert, observing the drained features of the boy that he had loved. The whispered misery, incoherency followed by one line that stood out from all of his years of life and everything he had threatened Daniel with before.
“I… I cannot,” he’d whispered, shaking his head, frantic, desperate for the beat of the heart that he could no longer hear with such stubborn clarity. “I cannot, I cannot watch you die.” Daniel's head was heavy cradled in his hands, lulling with fleeting consciousness as death swiped at his dangling feet. His head was tilted back, Armand's thumb prompting his mouth open, and it was with tiny droplets of blood from his own bitten tongue that he nursed Daniel back to stability like a mother bird with her young. Tongue snaking into the man's mouth, kisses desperate, deep, until he could feel the breath again from Daniel's nose. Not enough to bring him back from the sea of darkness he'd slipped unconsciously into, but enough to ensure it would happen in due time. All the while, Armand wept, until his cheeks were wet with tears thick and red, and it looked as if he, himself, were the victim of some unspeakable crime.
Delicate hands and trembling limbs tucked Daniel into bed, careless of how the blood stained white sheets. Necessities of recovery were set on the bedside table, within unsteady and desperate reach. Water, snacks, a bottle of warm bourbon he knew to be Daniel's favorite. A kiss was laid soft and bloodied upon Daniel's hair. And then Armand was gone.
Gone for weeks. Gone for months, even. Appearing in no more than a fleeting glance, a flash of familiar curls, of bright and unnatural eyes. Then he was gone again, an elusive predator. And Daniel was on the run, as he had been when they'd first met, aware of the newfound threat on his life. No, Armand had not been able to do it then. But he was nothing if not a fickle creature, and it was a close call that haunted Daniel. A scar on the back of his neck from fangs that tore flesh and were never given the chance at supernatural recovery.
But even so, Daniel missed Armand. The bond that they shared was the bond of a millennia, and he had never been one to successfully hold a grudge. So when Armand appeared before him on the edge of Pompeii, that haunting and alluring voice asking so kindly if he wished to go inside, he nodded his weary head and stepped through the door unlocked with a power that was telepathic. When he was bitten again, even softer than before, he wept. And when he was guided to his knees by hands both gentle and firm, he did not protest. Armand made it clear that night, Daniel would not be killed. As vampiric blood exploded upon his tongue, he was told that he was loved, and that killing him would not be possible for the vampire who had hunted him for the past four years. Immortality was not to be his, but neither was death. And Armand, having missed the internal deadline that would keep his feelings separated from this mortal youth, claimed, for the first time, a companion who was truly his own.