Work Text:
A gift for Tumblr user @eliestela! I hope you enjoy this quiet moment with Armand and Daniel on Christmas.
December 25, 1985
Night Island, Florida
Armand looks out of the patio doors of his home, into a velvet night touched in the distance by sounds of merrymaking.
The celebration of the Nativity had never held much interest for Armand--the Savior’s birth being so much less significant than his death and resurrection, in the grand scheme of things. Anyone could be born.
But Daniel, a proud American birthed nearly twenty centuries after Christ, held a certain confusing attachment to the holiday. Confusing, because he would profess on the one hand his contempt for the “crass commercialization” of the thing while in the very next instant placing the holly-adorned antlers of a fantastic beast upon Armand’s head like a jingling crown of felt and plastic.
Daniel had, once or twice, become… restless, at this time. In the November of 1980 he had disappeared for nearly a month, forcing Armand to track him through multiple countries and locations of various levels of repute before turning up amongst a clan of pervert filmmakers who had tried to talk him into taking a role in their next work. (Not pornography, strangely enough. That would have made sense.) When Armand asked him why, that time, he had shrugged and said, “Wanted to see if you’d chase me.”
(As though Armand couldn’t see, clear as day and just as untouchable, how he’d crept in the doors of St. Patrick’s Church during the Midnight Mass in hat and scarf, how his mouth had flooded with the memory of ham bedecked with pineapples and cherries so intense that Armand almost fancied he could taste it himself.)
Now, not yet two months past Lestat’s and Akasha’s reworking of all that ruled his sphere, Armand… fears. He fears because in the past, no matter which gutter Daniel drowned himself in, the bright clear thread of Armand’s love and need would arc into his mind like a hot wire and allow him the victory they both needed. Now, that surety is gone, drowned itself in the thundering torrent of unholy blood.
He fears, because Daniel has been making noises about the heat, the beaches, the endless neon playground that is the Paradise which Armand built for him. Discontent, but Armand can no longer quite touch the shape of it night-to-night.
He doesn’t want to touch it, truly. Doesn’t want to know, for certain, that his sole precious fledgling feels towards him all the natural antipathy that is part and parcel of being damned.
Lestat, of course, has no such concerns; older but no wiser, as he decks Louis in gorgeous wool from his favorite tailor on Savile Row and almost admirably manages to ignore the tightness at the corner of Louis’ eyes when reminded of the trips Lestat makes there, the connection which makes these purchases less a valuable gift than an errand-on-the way.
But they are present, for now and against all odds, and if they weren’t and Armand truly needed them he could find them in time. Only two beings walking the Earth are truly elusive to his gifts. (And only one is so vital to him, to his perseveration.)
The coven has been scattering bit by bit, like crumbs shaken from a napkin after a feast. He wonders what he will do, if his--
“You know it’s only three degrees above the all-time low here tonight? Global warming’s looking like a crock.”
He is beautiful, Armand thinks distantly, fair hair disarrayed by his absurd furry red-and-white cap. He is trying so hard to focus, even as his violet eyes, too, betray a distance like when he would drop acid and insist that there was music beneath the music coming from their neighbor’s radio.
He leans on the railing and looks out over their town. After a moment of waiting to see whether he would continue, Armand accepts that it is his own turn to converse.
“Seasons mean little, over time. Once winter came in summer, and all the world feared Armageddon. And yet if you were to help me call Australia now, they would be swimming in the sun. Impossible.”
(The words of Lestat’s favorite playwright echo, too-pat and yet obnoxiously true as ever.)
Daniel smells of oranges and cloves, peppermint and popcorn that he’d insisted on making a ritual of stringing and hanging, and Armand had dutifully obliged like an acolyte at a new temple. But not--Daniel no longer smells of sweat, or whiskey, or the sour living breath that comes from eating real things and digesting them. He no longer smells alive, as he leads Armand by the hand back into their beautiful modern open-seating area with its incongruous aluminum facsimile of an evergreen. He smells of blood, though, which is--close. Close as anything.
“I got you something, Boss.” His eyes are hopeful, almost shy in a way that makes Armand uncomfortable. Of course he will love whatever his beloved chooses to give him--he needn’t even see it to know that it is so. And of course his beloved may have whatever he wishes--
“But how did you know?” Daniel’s eyes shift again, mercurial, and Armand is no longer certain of what they mean; this is agony, losing a sense just when he needs it most--
And then he sees the torn paper, the Lionel-branded box which had rattled so pleasantly with the sound of intact sprues waiting to be snapped apart and reconfigured into shapes as artificial and mythologized as the tree under which they had sat.
An easy guess, he doesn’t say, because so little about Daniel is easy. A difficult puzzle, and this was one tiny piece he’d gleaned from how his lover’s eyes were drawn to these tiny contrivances, the near-hunger that reared in the pit of his stomach for the idea of them more than the things themselves.
“Do you like it?”
“Like it? This is vintage, in-box! I can’t believe you found it!”
They are neither of them going to talk about that boy who once existed, now long dead, but still present enough to have desired not just the object, or the cachet of having the thing, but the symbolic affair of putting it together, making and maintaining with the watchful aid of the father whose toil afforded such a prize and whose magnanimity had extended it.
Daniel had never owned a train set, not even the third-hand one that had eventually shown up at the Salvation Army once because by then he was thirteen and “too old” for such a toy. No number of Hopalong Cassidy cap guns or Davy Crockett hats could ever have compared.
“I have my ways,” Armand replies foolishly, hiding his face beneath his hair in a gesture that’s as good as an admittance that he’s embarrassed. Fearful, because he can buy this man suits and Rolexes and islands at the drop of a hat, but this is--personal.
This is Daniel before he was Daniel, Daniel who might-have-been before Armand took him and made him something else.
Daniel holds the yet-unopened toy reverently in his hands with their writer’s callus, muttering something about H and O scales and wondering aloud whether the glue has all dried up, and the scent of food they will never eat hangs cloying and luxuriant in a room so severely white as to seem snowed-in itself.
This is Christmas, then; it is the beginning of the end, with Daniel already thirty-three but newborn all at once, falling backwards into a place and time that Armand can no longer visit circumspectly but instead requires the vulgarities of blood or, worse, speech with all its imprecisions.
You’re welcome, he doesn’t need to say aloud.