Archive of Our Own

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Daniel Molloy ✔
@danielmolloy
Documentary. Not mockumentary. See you soon.

Silver Screen Publicity ✔
@SilverScreenPR
What really happened at that fateful disaster concert almost a year ago?

Daniel Molloy’s mockumentary, The Vampire Lestat. What’s sure to be an erotic, bloody, and fun two hours will be coming to a theater near you soon!

♡ 18.7K 10:00 PM - April 5, 2026

♡ 42.3K 10:03 PM - April 5, 2026

The campaign had managed to misclassify the film before it had even been released. Impressive.

He leaned back in his desk chair as his notifications began reproducing faster than bacteria in a warm petri dish.

Daniel grinned at the immediate chaos ignited by the announcement—and, more importantly, by his correction of it. He knew exactly what Documentary. Not mockumentary would do. The marketing company had accidentally handed him a lit match, and Daniel, exercising the sober judgment of a two-time Pulitzer winner, had tossed it directly into the gasoline.

People were already demanding clarification. Was he still serious? Was the entire film an elaborate publicity stunt for Lestat’s next album? Was Daniel Molloy finally admitting that the vampires in his book are fake, or merely committing so thoroughly to the bit that the distinction had become meaningless?

Interesting question, that last one.

Daniel clamped down on his lower lip to smother the laugh threatening to escape him. The other occupant of his brownstone—occupant sounded less incriminating than maker, fuck buddy, former lover, current whatever-the-fuck-they-were—was “working” in the sequestered bedroom at the opposite end of the apartment. Daniel had no desire to alert him to his antics prematurely.

He successfully swallowed another laugh at a particularly distressed commenter, and, in the process, angled one of his fangs directly over the soft skin of his lip.

It caught.

The fang sliced downward with insulting ease, and Daniel hissed as the sharp little sting split through the amusement.

“Shit.”

Fangs, he had discovered, served roughly the same social function among vampires that dick size served among human men. Everyone claimed not to care. Everyone was lying.

He had learned this interesting bit of vampire social status during a particularly memorable night on tour with Lestat. It was before they had pissed each other off in the I’m-going-to-greatly-enjoy-beheading-you way, rather than the passive-aggressive, petty way.

They had been on the tour bus with several members of Lestat’s human band and miscellaneous entourage when the subject came up. How, Daniel could no longer remember. He was most likely—actually, most certainly— high as a kite. It was however probably Lestat. Most conversations with Lestat eventually arrived at either his physical beauty, his sexual prowess, or the historical injustice of someone failing to appreciate both quickly enough.

Lestat had insisted his fangs were larger.

Daniel, possessed of eyes and therefore unable to let the lie stand, had disagreed.

The dispute ended with the two of them pressing their heads together and baring their teeth while the gathered humans were forced to inspect their mouths from several humiliating angles and cast votes. Nothing made immortality look dignified quite like two strung-out grown men demanding that a captive audience compare their canines.

Unfortunately, winning didn’t ease the discomfort that came with the more practical disadvantages of having a new body part.

See Daniel’s fangs were almost too large for his mouth. They slipped out whenever he smiled too broadly and regularly snagged over his lower lip, distorting his grin into some stupid, snagged-tooth smirk whenever they were unsheathed.

This time he had caught his lip badly enough that a bead of blood had already gathered along the cut.

Daniel lifted his hand to wipe it away, intending to deposit it on his sleeve like a civilized person, when another hand closed around his wrist.

Slender. Fine-boned. Immaculate.

Strong enough to put him through the desk.

Armand had appeared at his side at the first scent of blood.

Well. Appeared was imprecise.

Armand had crossed approximately forty feet of space without producing a sound or allowing Daniel’s vampire senses to register his approach, which was technically different from materializing out of thin air. Armand had explained this distinction more than once. Daniel remained unconvinced that it wasn’t just Armand arguing semantics.

His brownstone apartment was not especially large, at least not by Armand’s standards. Two thousand square feet, three bedrooms, one of them converted into a studio where Armand spent hours surrounded by whatever gadgets had caught his eye and enough aggressively controlled lighting to conduct minor surgery. Compared with the plazas, penthouses, theaters, crypts, monasteries, and assorted monuments to tax evasion Armand had occupied across the centuries, his place probably qualified as cramped.

It was still a good distance to cross without so much as disturbing the air.

Of course Daniel had asked him how he does it. Repeatedly.

Armand’s answer was always some variation of, You have two Pulitzers, Daniel. I am certain you can piece it together yourself.

Then he would blink with manufactured innocence and look up through his lashes, a performance so offensively delicate that Daniel could almost understand how five centuries of victims had failed to notice the malicious sociopath concealed behind the Bambi schtick.

Almost.

Daniel gave his captured wrist a halfhearted tug.

The resistance was pure theater, and not particularly convincing theater. Community-college black-box production at best.

Armand’s eyes narrowed. He tightened his grip.

“How is it that every time I leave you to your own devices, you end up spilling your own blood?”

“Oh, come on. That’s not even close to true.”

Armand just hummed and narrowed his eyes at him before lifting his free hand and drawing his thumb across Daniel’s lower lip. The pad of it pressed lightly against the cut, gathering the bright trace of blood. The light touch halted any thoughts Daniel might have had about snarking back, and instead, he followed the long line of Armand’s arm till it reached his face.

His gaze remained fixed on Daniel’s lip.

Then, ever so slowly, Armand brought the partially blood covered appendage to his mouth and slowly licked it.

There were easier ways to clean a thumb. Faster ways. Ways that did not require maintaining unbroken eye contact or letting the tip of his tongue swirl around the knuckle before taking the whole finger in his mouth then releasing it with a wet pop.

Armand was nothing if not efficient, which meant the inefficiency was the point.

The sting in Daniel’s lip sharpened with empathy. The response went through the rest of him with humiliating speed, hot and electric down the length of his spine.

Armand’s mouth curved slightly.

There it was. Confirmation.

Daniel had interviewed dictators with subtler tells.

Armand released his wrist.

Daniel leaned forward at once, reaching for his maker’s mouth, but Armand straightened before he could close the distance. Daniel’s momentum carried him into empty air. He caught himself against the desk with one hand and glared up from his chair.

Armand looked down at him, composed and faintly pleased.

Sadism and Armand were not technically synonyms. Daniel had checked. Still, the distinction was narrow enough to be of interest only to lexicographers and writers currently trying not to admit what the sadism implied about their own recreational preferences.

Different investigation.

Disregard.

Armand, of course, merely looked down his nose at him in a delightfully I know exactly what I’m doing to you, and you’re just going to sit there and take it anyway sort of way that only served to work Daniel up even more.

Daniel settled back into the chair and returned the look with his best expression of withering professional contempt. It had unsettled senators, corporate attorneys, and men who had ordered other men killed.

Armand appeared delighted by it.

Of course he did.

His attention shifted toward Daniel’s phone, still lying face-up on the desk with Twitter open. Notifications continued to stack across the screen in frantic little banners.

Armand tilted his head.

“Ah,” he said. “I suspected you were causing mischief. You were being uncharacteristically quiet.”

He said it as though Daniel were an untrained dog discovered beside the shredded remains of a handmade Italian shoe.

Unfair. Daniel was perfectly capable of behaving himself.

He simply found very few compelling reasons to do so.

Besides, he was plenty trained. Armand had personally seen to that task himself.

“Oh, come on, boss.” Daniel picked up the phone and turned the screen toward him. “This is just the announcement. The real mischief starts after the premiere.”

Armand read the post, then Daniel’s response. His face remained still, but Daniel caught the minute tightening at one corner of his mouth.

“You corrected neither the description of the film as erotic nor the promise that it will be fun.”

“Wasn’t my department.”

“You made the documentary.”

“I didn’t make the concert erotic. Take that up with Lestat.”

“I would prefer not to.”

“Yeah, well. Get in line.”

Armand looked down at the phone again. “You understand that they will interpret your response as confirmation.”

Daniel batted his eyes in a disturbed parody of his makers own faux-innocence charade. “Will they?”

Armand just looked at him unimpressed.

“You are not subtle.”

“Coming from you, that’s almost flattering.”

“It was not intended to be.”

“No, I got that.”

Daniel was actually pretty excited about the upcoming release of the documentary. It was looking like the resulting fallout of the premiere and subsequent showings would at least be entertaining, if not downright fun.

The book tour had been fun, in the same way dental surgery could be fun if the dentist permitted alcohol and occasionally invited a hostile theologian to argue beside the chair. Daniel had spent months telling people the book was nonfiction while audiences laughed, critics praised its commitment to the conceit, and interviewers asked how much of Louis’s story had been metaphor.

Metaphor. Right.

Apparently, centuries-old predatory immortal recounts his life in extensive, with extensive researched and verifiable details had been too straightforward. People preferred trauma, sexuality, capitalism, colonialism—anything but the possibility that the man on the page had actually killed and ate people.

The documentary and its subject being Lestat and his extremely fatal “domestic terror attack” of a concert had changed the temperature of the conversation from adamant disbelief to cautious curiosity.

Most people still did not believe vampires existed. That remained the respectable position. The position held by adults with mortgages and university affiliations and a professional investment in not appearing insane.

They were, however, no longer the only socially acceptable argument.

The debate had escaped social media and conspiracy forums. Academics were arguing over the historical evidence. Political commentators were demanding to know why the government was being so evasive about the incident and they had even fully investigated the concert. Experts in digital manipulation appeared on television to explain how footage of recorded vampires eyes, teeth, speed, and flying could have been manufactured, then disagreed publicly about which manufacturing process had been used.

No one could prove vampires were real.

However, no one could disprove that Daniel’s assertion vampires were real wrong either.

That was the sweet spot.

During filming, Daniel had made no effort to conceal what he was. The cameras had acquired months of footage in which he avoided daylight, healed too quickly, moved too fast, and occasionally forgot that normal people did not bare their teeth when irritated. Whether the public accepted the evidence was their problem.

Daniel had presented the facts.

Interpretation was where people got sentimental.

The post-release tour was going to be chaos. Interviews, arguments, accusations, think pieces, protesters, amateur frame-by-frame analysis. Some people would call him a fraud. Some would call him a monster. A smaller and considerably more irritating group would call him brave.

He couldn’t wait.

Plus there was the bonus that this tour, unlike the book tour, he would not be a recently abandoned baby vamp who was half furious, half heartbroken, and entirely unable to explain why he was heartbroken at all.

Armand had killed him, brought him back, and then fucked off. Which should have been the best outcome for him if he was fated to be turned by Armand. He had spent two weeks up to that point seeing the damage the vampire left on anybody he was associated with. So his maker fucking off should have been a good thing for Daniel.

He had not felt it to be a good thing despite that perfectly logical reasoning and he then spent most of the next three years mad at himself for feeling abandoned at all.

Still, his maker had murdered him, unmurdered him, left him alone with a new body and a collection of appetites no human self-help book adequately addressed, then vanished before Daniel could decide whether to thank him, throttle him, or ask why his absence felt less like abandonment and more like bereavement.

Every question about Armand on the book tour had struck a bruise Daniel could not remember receiving.

He had hated him for that.

He still hated him for parts of it.

Different parts now.

Progress.

This time Armand was not going to vanish before the cameras arrived. He was not going to hover at the edge of the tour, interfere from a distance, or mind fuck some poor assistant to stand in the same room as Daniel so Armand could be present without Daniel actually being aware.

Well. The assistant part might still happen. Not the mind controlling part but the Armand playing his assistant part.

He had already commandeered half the practical arrangements surrounding Cannes, and Daniel had the growing suspicion that the production team believed he had hired the world’s most beautiful and terrifying personal manager. Armand scheduled interviews around the movement of the sun, rejected hotel suites with insufficient blackout coverage, requested architectural plans for every venue Daniel would enter, and had begun discussing the relative merits of three different routes from the hotel to the Palais des Festivals as though preparing to extract a head of state from an active war zone.

Daniel objected to nearly every instruction.

He still let Armand go through with most of them.

It wasn’t blind surrender to Armand’s obsessive controlling nature. It was an empirical judgment. The authority was subject-specific. Armand knew more about being a vampire than Daniel did, principally because Armand had survived five hundred years without perishing in some dramatic fashion that vampires were prone too. It also helped that being in control of things, down to the even the most minute details, seemed to settle Armand’s nerves like nothing else.

Daniel was not obligated to enjoy how much Armand enjoyed having that much control over parts of his life.

Unfortunately, he did.

Armand’s gaze remained on him, attentive in that unnerving way that suggested he had followed at least a portion of Daniel’s thoughts from the changes in his face alone.

“What?” Daniel asked.

“You are pleased.”

“The internet’s having a collective nervous breakdown. Of course I’m pleased.”

“No.” Armand placed one hand on the back of Daniel’s chair and leaned closer, not enough to give him the kiss he had been denied. Naturally. “Something else.”

There it was. The invasive little scalpel slipped neatly between two ribs.

Daniel glanced back at his phone. Another few thousand notifications had arrived while they spoke. Easier to look at those. Thousands of strangers were much less intrusive than Armand when he decided to be curious.

“It’ll be different this time,” Daniel said.

Armand waited.

He had weaponized silence long before Daniel entered journalism. Annoying to discover somebody else had filed the patent.

Daniel turned the phone over on the desk. “The press tour.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to be there.”

“I had understood that to be the arrangement.”

“Yeah, well, you understand a lot of arrangements that nobody remembers making.”

The words came out sharper than he intended.

Armand went very still.

Not wounded. Daniel had stopped trusting the obvious interpretation of Armand’s stillness years before he remembered there had been years to stop trusting it. But something in his expression closed, the faint amusement withdrawing behind the perfect blankness he used when deciding how much of himself Daniel was permitted to see.

Daniel could have left it there.

Instead, he reached out and caught two of Armand’s fingers where they rested against the back of the chair.

Armand looked down at their hands.

Daniel resisted the urge to fill the silence with a joke. A heroic achievement. Alert the committee.

“I asked you to come,” he continued. “You said yes. Clear chain of custody.”

“I did.”

“So there we go.”

Armand’s fingers turned beneath his, fitting their hands together more deliberately. “There we go.”

It should not have felt like an admission. Daniel had invited people places before. Wives to award ceremonies. Daughters to dinners they had declined. Sources into rooms where neither of them was safe. Professional contacts, lovers, friends, people who had occupied one category and left in another.

This was different.

Not because Armand would be nearby. Armand was frequently nearby. Actually as Daniel had discovered Armand had basically been always nearby for most of his adult life. Sometimes visibly, sometimes in the metaphysical sense that Daniel had learned to find deeply irritating.

He would be there because Daniel had asked him.

Beside him.

The public would speculate. Of course they would. They would call Armand his assistant, manager, handler, bodyguard, scandalously young boyfriend, adopted son, sugar baby, publicity stunt, or an exceptionally committed piece of performance art. They would take photographs, compare them with descriptions from from his book, study every touch, and invent a dozen explanations more comforting than the truth.

Let them.

For once, Daniel knew what the arrangement was.

Or knew what it was not, which at their stage of emotional development qualified as nearly the same thing.

Armand would not be there because they were resuming some lost relationship Daniel could not remember agreeing to. He would not be there as proof that the boy from San Francisco had finally found his way back through Daniel’s ruined brain. He would not be there because Armand had waited long enough and therefore earned the right to reclaim him.

Daniel had asked him now.

Present tense. Active voice.

Armand was not simply going to be around.

He was going to be with him.

As an actual plus-one.

Sanguine Cinema
@sanguinecinema replying to @danielmolloy
daniel molloy correcting “mockumentary” to “documentary” and NOTHING ELSE in that sentence is the funniest possible confirmation that the movie is two hours of vampire sex and murder

♡ 31.8K 10:05 PM - April 5, 2026

Night Island Truthers
@nightislandtruthers replying to @danielmolloy
You people realize Daniel Molloy has spent three years insisting vampires are real, right? This isn’t a marketing bit. This is either the largest disclosure event in human history or one elderly journalist having the most expensive psychotic break ever recorded.

♡ 18.2K 10:07 PM - April 5, 2026

Lestatology
@lestatology replying to @danielmolloy
“WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AT THE DISASTER CONCERT” idk babe your lead singer caused an international mass casualty event and then vanished for eleven months. maybe start there.

♡ 24.6K 10:09 PM - April 5, 2026

Molloy Defamation League
@molloydefamationleague replying to @danielmolloy
documentary. not mockumentary.

sir people DIED.

♡ 27.1K 10:11 PM - April 5, 2026

Vampire Truther 1967
@vampiretruther1967 replying to @danielmolloy
HE DIDN’T DENY EROTIC
HE DIDN’T DENY BLOODY
HE DIDN’T DENY FUN

♡ 39.4K 10:13 PM - April 5, 2026

Cinemortis
@cinemortis replying to @danielmolloy
Nobody believes Daniel Molloy is a vampire but somehow everybody agrees the twink always standing behind him probably is.

♡ 46.7K 10:16 PM - April 5, 2026

Two weeks earlier.

Daniel had been staring at the same blank email for forty-seven minutes.

Not continuously. He had checked the news twice, answered three messages, read half an article about himself, and spent several minutes watching Armand use an iPad with the grave concentration of a Renaissance scholar handling a newly recovered religious text. But the email itself remained blank, which meant Daniel had technically been working on it for forty-seven minutes.

The Cannes guest experience coordinator had asked for the name of his plus-one.

One name, unless his maker decided to complicate matters by resurrecting one of the others.

That was if Armand did accept being his plus one. Which Daniel had already checked the box that said he was bringing a plus one. Without actually asking the intended person to be his plus one.

Daniel knew what he wanted to type.

He and Armand sat at opposite ends of the couch, if opposite could reasonably describe Armand’s bare feet shoved beneath Daniel’s thigh. The television played silently across from them. Some prestige crime drama Armand had selected and neither of them was watching. Daniel’s laptop rested open on his knees. Armand’s iPad cast a cool blue light across his face as he reviewed something Daniel suspected was either sixteenth-century art restoration or a seedy outdated Internet forum.

Possibly both.

Armand preferred the couch corner nearest the hall, where he could see the front door, the windows, and the entrance to the kitchen. Daniel preferred whichever side allowed him to put his feet in Armand’s lap while denying he had chosen it for that reason.

They had been cohabitating for nearly a year.

Cohabitating. Not living together.

Different thing.

Living together implied a conversation. A lease. Perhaps matching towels purchased under fluorescent lighting while one person pretended not to care about thread count. Cohabitation was temporary. Scientific. Two organisms occupying the same environment while somebody monitored the results for aggression, mating behavior, or signs one had begun consuming the other.

Admittedly, the distinction had grown less persuasive once Armand started receiving mail there.

Besides, only the last six months of the year had actually been spent in his apartment. The first six had taken place in a succession of hotels while they stalked Lestat across Montreal, gathered up Armand’s new cult members, planned how best to disrupt a vampire concert, and then cleaning up the consequences after said concert.

Cleaning up being the polite phrase for tracking down the surviving Great Conversion zealots and removing their heads.

Hotels had offered both of them plausible deniability. Separate beds. Temporary addresses. Little paper sleeves around key cards that stopped working if either of them remained too long.

Nothing about a hotel room suggested a future. He hadn’t wanted one with Armand then, anyway. He had only hesitantly joined up with his recently returned—after leaving for cigarettes—maker to reap the benefits of his powerful blood, then planned to dip.

That obviously hadn’t happened. Now they were cohabiting in Daniel’s home, with no discussion of separating anywhere in sight.

Presently, Across the hall, light shone beneath the door to the third bedroom. Armand’s studio now, though Daniel still occasionally thought of it as the spare room. It was intended to be Armand’s bedroom when he decided to bring Armand to New York with him. That illusion had survived approximately three days after they arrived.

Eventually the bed had at some point been removed. Then came the worktables, the lighting panels, the boxes of mysterious substances, the disassembled cameras, three computers, and whatever unidentified machine currently produced a low hum at irregular intervals.

Daniel had asked what it did.

Armand had told him he would explain once Daniel stopped referring to every object he did not recognize as a torture device.

Daniel remained unenlightened.

The room had been Daniel’s olive branch. He had offered it as Armand’s space once they decided the cleanup was coming to an end. Armand thanked him and did not ask about which room he would be sleeping in. Apparently, the obvious answer was that it would be Daniel’s.

To be fair they had been sleeping in the same bed for about two months at that point, even though Armand had still booked two bed suites.

Honestly the separate-beds in the same hotel room situation had lasted longer than expected now that he was looking back on it.

Four months, actually.

Four months of hotel rooms selected with suspicious attention to blackout curtains, underground parking, and secret service looking staff willing to deliver sealed containers of blood without contacting law enforcement. Four months of Armand sleeping—or performing the vampire approximation of sleep—in the other bed. Four months of lessons in hunting, feeding, and the complicated process by which Armand intended to drag Daniel’s undead ass back into the sun.

The instruction had begun with Daniel drinking Armand’s blood.

Daniel had expected ceremony. Candles, perhaps. A silver knife. Definitely some elaborate excuse for homoerotic blood play.

Which Daniel would admit, despite having extremely complicated feelings towards his maker at the time—and well he still did—had peaked his interest.

Instead, Armand handed him a small glass bottle.

“A flacon,” he corrected when Daniel called it a shooter.

“It’s the size of something they sell behind a liquor-store register.”

“It was made in Venice in 1743.”

“So an antique shooter.”

Armand had looked at him for a long moment and left the bottle on the table.

That had been the general tone of their early companionship. Perfectly restrained. Almost Mormon.

Plenty of room left for Jesus.

Then Daniel drank from the refilled blood shooter for the fifth time, allowed Armand to lead him into the morning sun, burned himself somewhere between medium-rare and cremated, and collapsed onto the hotel bed to recover and proceeded to dream about Armand.

Except vampires did not dream. Not exactly. Their sleeping minds replayed memory: moments preserved in blood, trauma, or whatever neurological filing system survived death.

The first memory had been sexual.

So had the second.

And the third, fourth, and several subsequent entries in what was rapidly becoming the most explicit phonographic archival collection Daniel had ever investigated.

He had been appropriately horrified for the correct amount of seconds before promptly resolving to ignore them.

Of course, that was against every instinct that had earned him two Pulitzers, but Daniel placed the”dreams” into a mental box marked DO NOT OPEN and continued with their daylight training and double date beheading planning anyways.

Sex could be dismissed. Desire a complicated thing and Daniel’s wires had always been a bit crossed.

Of course Daniel wanted Armand in the present. Who wouldn’t? The man was beautiful, secretly kind of funny, unexpectedly sardonic, and had a huge rack.

He had told himself that his subconscious locating historical precedent for the problem was inconvenient, not revelatory to his present day attraction.

Then the memories changed.

No restraints. No blood. No sadomasochistic foreplay that would put even the mansons to shame.

Instead they were simply lying together in a bed, sheets covering them like a tasteful boudoir photo. Armand had looked at him for a while, companionable silence stretched between then while some song played over a distant radio. Dream Daniel had felt soft and hazy, he could feel both their shared fondness drenching the room. The feeling settling over him like a warm blanket.

Familiar and comfortable.

Armand then reached up, tucked a curl behind Daniel’s ear, and pressed their foreheads together.

“I love you,” he whispered.

The kiss that followed was soft.

Chaste, even.

Daniel woke so violently that Armand, in the parallel bed, fumbled his iPad.

The tablet in current day Armand’s hands was not the same one from that night. Probably because Daniel remembers launching himself across the space between the hotel beds, chucking the Ipad out of Armand’s hands, and straddling his maker before either of them had decided whether this constituted an attack.

Armand’s eyes had gone wide beneath him.

Daniel had seized the open lining of his partially unbuttoned shirt and hauled him upright until their noses nearly touched.

“It wasn’t just San Francisco, was it?”

Armand’s expression changed.

A pathetically sad smile scarred his face. The expression obviously worn in. The fact of that revelation had made Daniel’s traitorous heart hurt.

Armand’s large bug eyes had then slowly closed. Like the lid on a casket. Slow and final.

When he opened them again and looked at Daniel through the red beginning to gather along his lower lashes all he said was:

“No, beloved,” he said. “It was not.”

Then reached up and tucked one of Daniel’s loose curls behind his ear.

Exactly as he had in the memory.

Daniel reasoned at the time that the taste of those words—the feelings the dream had left him with—fueled him to do what he did next.

Daniel kissed him.

What else was he supposed to do? Request corroborating documentation?

Besides, he’d made way dumber decisions before. Hell, he’d apparently made this particular dumb decision before. Daniel had already been doing a fair amount of relapsing during his new lease on un-life. Why not relapse on this, too?

Things had stopped being Mormon shortly afterward.

Daniel shifted on the couch. Armand’s foot moved with him, maintaining contact beneath his thigh without interrupting whatever he was reading.

That was Armand. Constantly present in ways small enough to deny. A foot beneath Daniel’s leg. A hand at his back when they crossed a crowded room. Blood in an antique bottle. Fifty-two years of surveillance presented as an extended act of devotion.

Parts of their affair had begun emerging in pieces after that first memory. Some supplied by Armand. Some dragged upward by the blood. Some appearing as sudden bodily recognition that Daniel disliked most of all.

Mid-seventies to mid-eighties. Twelve years, approximately. Obsessive, codependent, frequently violent, and apparently scandalous even by vampire standards.

Then Armand erased it.

All of it.

He deposited Daniel in a shitty rehab center in Chicago, removed himself from Daniel’s consciousness, and continued watching him from a distance for the next four decades.

Daniel remembered fragments now. Rooms without addresses. Armand’s hands in younger hair. A phone ringing somewhere across an ocean. The sour taste of jealousy. Love so consuming it had apparently left a crater even after the person it was for had been removed.

Enough evidence to know the relationship had existed.

Not enough to know which version of it was true.

Armand remembered everything, which was precisely why his testimony could not be considered impartial. He controlled the archive. He had altered the primary source. He also had a documented history of arranging evidence until the desired conclusion appeared inevitable.

Daniel liked him anyway.

Annoying, but there it was.

He liked Armand’s dry little observations and the way he could dismantle a pompous person with one politely worded question. He liked hunting with him. He liked working in the same room and looking up hours later to discover Armand had moved closer in imperceptible stages. He liked arguing with him, fucking him, and occasionally combining both activities until the distinction became technical.

Still Daniel did not trust him.

That was there too.

He trusted Armand to teach him. To recognize when the sunlight had become dangerous. To stop when Daniel’s resistance stopped being playful. To pin him to a mattress, hold his throat, hurt him precisely how he liked, and return every piece of control Daniel had deliberately handed over afterward.

He did not trust Armand’s account of what happened and why he had erased twelve years of Daniel’s life.

Compartmentalization. Everybody recommended it until somebody became good at it.

A thin pressure moved through the bond.

Not a thought. The maker-fledgling connection remained mercifully less articulate than telepathy. Emotion came through distorted and stripped of context, like music heard through the wall of another apartment.

Armand was curious.

He had noticed Daniel staring.

Daniel looked back at the laptop.

The blank email waited patiently.

Guest name:

One name

Six characters.

The cursor continued blinking with the steady rhythm of accusation.

There had once been people Daniel could have handed a problem like this to. Not allies, exactly. Resources. The Talamasca had always preferred relationships that could be filed under the second word.

Daniel had severed his remaining ties to the Talamasca when he chose to side with Armand. Not because Armand ordered him to, although the distinction had occasionally become narrow enough to require examination.

Armand had made his position clear. He wanted nothing to do with them. He would not tolerate their surveillance, their agents, or their continued intervention in Daniel’s life. He had also calmly stated that he would slaughter anyone involved in monitoring Daniel after they had joined up if they failed to withdraw.

Very mature. Excellent conflict-resolution skills.

Daniel had still been the one to cut the line.

There was no love lost. The Talamasca had interfered with the publication of his book, frightened other publishers away, and used their position to force revisions Daniel still resented. However they also had set him up with extremely useful resources—blood bags, proper UV coating for his apartment windows, and a vampire-friendly personal assistant—who had literally been a lifesaver on his book tour, as she’d fought tooth and fucking nail to get him all-night-only interviews.

She had also almost certainly been reporting his movements to the Talamasca.

Too useful not to be a spy. Daniel respected the craftsmanship.

It sucked that he’d had to fire her, but it had been that or murder by 500 year old vampire.

So before Armand could make good on his promise he advised her, with professional courtesy, to get the fuck out of dodge sooner then as soon as possible.

So that had been one tentative ally down the drain.

Louis had remained, theoretically. He had helped Daniel through his first months after Armand abandoned him, teaching him what his maker should have stayed to teach. Their relationship had settled into something almost friendly, provided neither of them discussed the interview, the book, Armand, Lestat, Claudia, Paris, San Francisco, or most of the nineteenth century.

Louis’s not-boyfriend had also constituted as an ally for a bit.

Lestat had disliked him from the jump. Daniel returned the feeling with mutual contempt. But it had been an almost playful, semi-friendly, I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine, relationship during their brief collaboration.

Both relationships had been rocky, but if Daniel had found himself in deep shit back then, Louis and Lestat would’ve helped. Reluctantly, probably. With a lot of complaining. But they would’ve helped.

Which meant that, when Daniel helped behead the both of them, he had effectively removed every available fallback position.

He was alone with the man who had once loved him, erased him, abandoned him, murdered him, resurrected him, and then asked for another chance in roughly that order.

A questionable decision.

So far, it had also been a good one.

Armand had been a perfect gentleman while Daniel waited for the inevitable catastrophe at the start. Two hotel beds. Separate belongings. No coercive seduction. No attempt to use the blood lessons as an excuse to resume whatever sexual rituals Armand remembered and Daniel did not.

Instead Daniel had been the one who crossed the room.

Important distinction.

The email cursor continued blinking.

He thinks back to about six months earlier when he had sat in what would be their last shared hotel room with a flight website open on his laptop. One passenger entered automatically. He added another before thinking too hard about it.

Daniel Molloy.

Armand.

The reservation had looked startlingly intimate.

Two seats on the same flight. As though they were ordinary people returning from an ordinary trip instead of two vampires post kill spree.

Daniel booked them.

Then, while Armand stood near the window reading something on his beloved iPad, Daniel asked whether he had any possessions he wanted shipped to New York before they arrived.

Armand looked up.

Genuinely startled.

A rare sight. Daniel should have photographed it.

“Did you think I was going to kick you to the curb, boss?”

The nickname produced its usual response. Armand’s pupils widened, swallowing amber until his eyes looked dark and predatory.

“We have no reason to cohabitate now,” he said.

Plainly. Casually. As though the answer meant nothing.

Their bond immediately exposed him.

Longing moved through Daniel with enough force to feel briefly indistinguishable from his own. It curled beneath his ribs and lodged there, intimate and unwanted.

Armand had spent five centuries perfecting his bluff. Apparently, his maker had neglected to account for supernatural emotional leakage.

Daniel rolled his eyes.

By then, he had concluded there had never been a practical reason for them to share mid-priced hotel rooms with two beds. Armand could have purchased adjoining penthouses in every city they visited. He could have bought several of the hotels.

“Don’t be stupid,” Daniel said, because tenderness required camouflage and hostility was available.

Armand’s eye twitched.

He looked like he was about to say something but—

“We’re companions, right?” Daniel continued. “You can take whichever room you want. The place isn’t a palace, but—”

He never finished.

Armand crossed the room, knocked him backward, and fucked him directly into the hotel carpet with enough enthusiasm to make the security deposit theoretical.

When they reached New York, Armand unlocked Daniel’s front door using his own set of keys.

Separate from Daniel’s.

The previous owner had sworn only two copies existed. Daniel possessed both.

He stared at Armand.

Armand stared back.

All Daniel could really do was roll his eyes and summon the appropriate amount of annoyance despite not being surprised in the slightest.

That had all been six months ago.

Since then, life had settled.

The studio. The couch. A shared bed neither of them discussed. Armand’s clothes appearing beside Daniel’s in the closet with the slow certainty of an occupying army. Separate projects completed in the same room. Arguments over feeding, sunlight, schedules, the ethics of murdering critics, and whether Armand was allowed to rearrange Daniel’s kitchen.

They fought. A lot.

They fucked during, before, or after the fights a lot too, depending on the severity and whether the subject permitted it.

They watched films together. They hunted together. They sat in silence for hours without the silence demanding repair.

Domestic bliss, provided one ignored the under-negotiated BDSM and first-degree murder.

Now the documentary was nearly finished. Months of edits, legal threats, rights negotiations, visual-effects experts insisting that unaltered footage was physically impossible, and Talamasca executives attempting to remove every detail that made the story worth telling.

The release would rupture the small life they had constructed.

Daniel would step back into interviews, cameras, travel, scrutiny. Every stranger with a microphone would ask whether he was a liar. Every vampire with access to the internet would decide whether he was stupid or a danger. Every person who would see Armand—and realize him and the “character” in his book shared the same name and description—would begin asking questions.

Daniel could do it alone.

He had crossed war zones and interviewed men who would have killed him if the recorder had stopped at the wrong moment. He had conducted investigations with bounties on his head, guns to his back, and threats to his family all with only the emotional support of several miniature bottles of bourbon.

He did not need Armand to be there.

That was not the problem.

Daniel wanted him there.

The invitation to Cannes glowed on Daniel’s screen beneath the empty guest field.

France complicated matters.

As far as Daniel knew, Armand had not returned since leaving with Louis after they burned Théâtre des Vampires and slaughtered his coven. Daniel possessed an intimate insight into what Paris meant to Armand: The children of darkness, Lestat, the theater, the old laws, Louis, Claudia, and seventy-seven years of companionship built over a grave Armand had dug.

Cannes was not Paris.

Geographically, emotionally, historically. Different city. Different coast. Different collection of expensive people congratulating themselves inside beautiful buildings.

Still France in the way Los Angeles was not San Francisco but both were still in California.

Daniel did not know whether Armand wanted to return.

He did not know whether Armand wanted to be photographed beside him when he did.

Armand had spent the past year draped over Daniel in every private room they entered. He touched him constantly, watched him constantly, referred to him with proprietary little endearments that suggested property law had expanded to include human souls.

Private possession was easy.

Public acknowledgment was different.

Daniel had spent twelve years as the hidden third point in Armand and Louis’s carefully maintained arrangement. He did not remember most of it, but his body occasionally supplied the emotional residue: waiting, secrecy, the particular humiliation of being wanted intensely and acknowledged incompletely.

Maybe that was why the empty field bothered him.

Maybe he did not want to discover that Armand preferred him in private.

Nobody’s business.

Especially not his own.

Daniel looked toward Armand.

Armand still held the iPad, although the screen had gone dark several minutes ago. He was no longer reading. He was watching Daniel over the top edge of it with the patient, mildly predatory interest of a cat waiting for an injured bird to admit it could no longer fly.

Of course he knew something was up.

Daniel had spent nearly an hour composing a one-name email without typing the one name. Even a human would have noticed.

Probably.

Daniel cleared his throat.

“So, uh…”

Excellent beginning.

Two Pulitzers.

Armand slowly lowered the iPad into his lap.

Daniel stared at the blinking cursor instead of him. “Do you have any plans for the next few months?”

Silence.

Stupid fucking question.

Daniel knew Armand’s schedule. Armand knew Daniel knew his schedule. Most of Armand’s current plans involved Daniel, monitoring Daniel, correcting Daniel, or pretending not to have arranged some aspect of Daniel’s life three weeks before Daniel knew it required arranging.

Frankly, they should probably work on Armand having a life outside Daniel, but also he didn’t want to poke that particular hornets nest at the moment.

So yes Daniel knew he didn’t any plans.

Armand’s eyebrows rose.

Just slightly.

Still, the expression managed to communicate that exact sentiment.

Daniel looked away.

The blood from their hunt earlier that evening still sat warm and fresh in his veins. Apparently it had nowhere better to go, because it promptly rushed into his cheeks.

Wonderful.

Immortality. Superhuman strength. Eternal youth.

Blushing like a teenager asking somebody to prom.

“Just because, you know, the documentary’s premiering soon,” Daniel continued. “Then there’s the press tour. Showings. Interviews. A few months of traveling all over the place while people ask whether I’m a liar, a murderer, or suffering from an elaborate neurological disorder.”

“I am aware.”

“Right. Obviously.”

Armand waited.

Daniel rubbed the back of his neck.

“And I was wondering whether you wanted to…”

Christ.

He had interviewed presidents. Dictators. Cult leaders. Serial killers. He had once asked a man with three armed guards whether he had personally ordered the bodies of six journalists dumped into the sea.

This was somehow worse.

“…come with me,” he finally managed.

Armand’s expression did not change.

Daniel kept talking.

Defensive reflex.

“And I don’t mean following me around without telling me or hanging out in the walls or whatever the hell you do.”

“I do not hang out inside walls.”

“Good. Strong objection to the least important part.”

“Daniel.”

“I don’t mean lurking backstage, either. Or hidden away in a hotel room while I do interviews. Or possessing some twenty-five-year-old production assistant and wearing them like a Bluetooth headset.”

“I have never worn anyone like a Bluetooth headset.”

“Again. Extremely reassuring.”

Armand placed the iPad on the coffee table.

Slowly.

Daniel’s stomach tightened.

“As my plus-one,” he said quickly. “That’s what I mean.”

There.

Not complicated.

Except apparently it was, because Daniel could feel himself preparing to explain the phrase as though Armand had somehow failed to understand the basic concept of event invitations.

“I already checked the box saying I was bringing somebody,” Daniel admitted. “Which, in retrospect, was maybe presumptuous.”

“Presumptuous of whom?”

“Me.”

“That is not unusual.”

“Thanks.”

“You are welcome.”

Daniel glared at him.

Armand’s mouth twitched.

“And not just as my—” Daniel made a vague gesture. “Whatever you’ve been pretending to be when humans ask.”

“Your assistant?”

“You’re not my assistant.”

“No,” Armand agreed. “I am considerably more competent.”

“See, this is exactly why I haven’t given you a job title.”

“You have called me your handler.”

“That was to piss you off.”

“It did not.”

“I know.”

“In fact it did the opposite.”

“I know.”

Daniel—now somehow more embarrassed—looked back at the screen.

Guest name:

Still empty.

“I mean publicly together,” he said.

The word came out quieter than intended.

Armand stared at him.

Daniel could feel the full weight of his attention settle over him, pinning him in place more effectively than Armand’s hands usually did. Which was saying something.

Daniel looked away first.

Mistake.

The silence immediately invited him to fill it.

“The world already thinks I’m batshit,” he continued. “I don’t think showing up with some scandalously young-looking man is going to move the needle much. They’ll probably assume I’m an old creep having a late-life crisis.”

Armand’s gaze flicked fondly over Daniel’s face. “You are an old creep.”

“Yeah, thank you. Right back at you. The point is they’ll assume I’m robbing the cradle.”

Daniel sighed trying to work his way towards an actual direct confrontation so Armand couldn’t keep looping this conversation around past the actual point.

“I know you don’t really enjoy publicity,” he said. “Or crowds. Or people photographing you. Or France, probably.”

Armand’s expression changed at that.

A shadow passing beneath the surface. Barely there then gone just as fast. As if Armand had caught the emotion purposefully before Daniel could identify it and pulled it behind a locked door.

Interesting.

Not the time.

“I understand if you don’t want to go back,” Daniel continued. “I just thought it might be…”

He hesitated.

A terrible idea. Never pause while searching for an honest word. That was how they got you.

“Nice,” he finished.

Armand still said nothing.

Daniel shrugged with one shoulder, aiming for casual and achieving something closer to visible spinal distress.

“We’re companions or whatever weird vampire bullshit term you prefer. People are going to see us together eventually.” He glanced down at the laptop again. “I just don’t know whether you want them to.”

There.

The real question, finally dragged into the room bleeding.

Do you want to be seen with me?

Armand moved.

One moment he was on the opposite end of the couch. The next he had removed Daniel’s laptop from his knees, placed it carefully on the coffee table, and settled directly into Daniel’s lap.

Daniel’s hands found his waist automatically.

Armand straddled him, knees bracketing Daniel’s hips, before taking Daniel’s face between both hands. His fingers slid into Daniel’s hair, claws resting in ten precise points against his scalp.

Not enough to break the skin.

Yet.

The position forced Daniel’s chin upward and made looking away impossible.

Not that he particularly wanted to.

Sometimes the desire to stare at Armand became so overwhelming it bordered on compulsion. His face was beautiful, obviously. Absurdly beautiful. But beauty alone did not explain it. Daniel had interviewed beautiful people before. Most became less interesting after five minutes.

Armand only became stranger the longer Daniel looked.

“Pet,” Armand said.

Unfair opening.

He knew exactly what the word did to Daniel. Heat moved through him at once, sharper and lower than the embarrassment already warming his skin.

Daniel’s fingers tightened around Armand’s waist.

“There is no reality,” Armand continued, “in which I would permit you to attend this premiere without me.”

Daniel’s stomach flipped.

“Permit?”

Armand’s claws pressed down.

A warning.

Daniel smiled despite himself. “Sorry, boss. Continue.”

“There was never another candidate for the position.”

“That’s incredibly presumptuous considering you hadn’t actually been invited until thirty seconds ago.”

“I knew you would ask.”

“You looked pretty fucking surprised.”

Armand paused—considering. Then nodded his head in acknowledgment before continuing.

“I had a feeling you would ask.” He said

“Different statement.” Daniel shot back. Though his voice had a bit of quiver in it due to having a lap full of Armand.

“Yes.”

Daniel opened his mouth to argue further.

Armand tightened his grip.

“Listen.”

Daniel shut his mouth.

Mostly because he wanted to.

The claws helped.

“I will attend the premiere,” Armand said. His voice remained quiet, carefully controlled, but his eyes poured out everything his tone concealed. Hunger. Relief. Possession. An old hurt suddenly offered somewhere to rest. “I will accompany you throughout the tour. I will attend every interview, screening, dinner, reception, and tedious conversation you require.”

“You’re really selling the glamour.”

“I will stand beside you beneath every light and before every camera.”

The image struck Daniel with surprising force.

Armand on the carpet beside him. One hand curled around Daniel’s arm. Flashbulbs turning the night white around them. Every camera capturing exactly where Armand had chosen to stand.

Daniel swallowed.

“Wrapped around my arm?” he asked, because sincerity had reached dangerous levels and somebody needed to intervene.

Armand’s pupils widened.

“If you can refrain from wandering away from me for the duration of the photographs.”

“No promises.”

“Then I will hold you more securely.”

“Threatening.”

“Promising.”

Armand’s claws pierced Daniel’s scalp.

Barely. Tiny pinpricks of pain, each one deliberate. The first slow warmth of blood began to gather beneath his hair.

Daniel inhaled sharply.

Armand watched the reaction with open satisfaction.

Of course he did.

“You imagine I would prefer to remain hidden,” Armand said.

“I imagine you prefer to do most things from the shadows. You’re very committed to the aesthetic.”

“That is not what you meant.”

No.

It wasn’t.

Daniel’s humor faltered.

Armand saw it happen. His thumbs moved slowly along Daniel’s cheekbones, gentling the hold without releasing him.

“You believe I might want you privately but refuse to acknowledge you publicly.”

Daniel’s jaw tightened.

“Didn’t say that.”

“You did not need to.”

“Dangerous policy.”

“Yes.”

Daniel stared at him.

Armand had no right to say it so plainly. No right to reach directly into the center of the fear Daniel had spent an hour circling and name it before Daniel could dress it up as something less humiliating.

Then again, that was Armand’s preferred method of intimacy. Find the soft organ. Place one precise finger against it. Ask why the other person was flinching.

Armand tilted Daniel’s head back another fraction. He proceeded to lower his mouth to Daniel’s neck. Pausing just before lips would brush his pulse.

Then, in a whisper so faint Daniel might have missed it if Armand’s lips hadn’t been so close to his ear. Intimate and meant only for them.

“The entire world will know you are mine.”

The words moved through Daniel like another set of claws.

Possession should have irritated him.

It did irritate him.

Somewhere.

Presumably.

Theoretically.

Armand leaned up and closer until the loose ends of his hair brushed Daniel’s forehead.

“They will know whose blood made you,” he continued. “They will know who stands beside you. They will know exactly where I have chosen to be.”

Daniel’s mouth had gone dry.

Armand’s hold softened again.

“But you asked me.”

The shift was small.

Important.

Daniel went still.

“I will be there because you asked me to be there,” Armand said.

Daniel looked at him.

For once, there was no elaborate explanation. No narrowing of definitions. No attempt to argue that the past granted Armand rights in the present.

Daniel had asked. Armand had accepted.

Armand had waited for Daniel to ask.

Maybe not patiently. Armand’s concept of patience occasionally included surveillance, threats, and quiet emotional warfare. But he had waited for the actual invitation.

“Yeah?” Daniel said.

“Yeah.” Armand returned.

The word always sounded so funny when spoken in Armand’s accent. It didn’t really belong in the mouth of someone as encompassing as Armand, to little of a word.

Daniel curled both hands into the fabric at Armand’s waist and pulled him closer.

Armand’s mouth curved.

Then the smile faded.

“I have been hidden from you long enough,” he said. “I will not choose to be hidden beside you now.”

The sentence landed somewhere deeper than the claws.

Daniel knew Armand loved him.

That had never been the uncertainty.

Armand loved with the horrifying persistence of geological pressure. Daniel could feel that love through their bond even when he did not want it.

Daniel did not love Armand.

He liked him. Wanted him. Trusted him with specific, clearly marked regions of his life while keeping armed guards around the rest.

The arrangement was unstable, frequently insane, and working much better than it had any right to.

But Armand sat in his lap with Daniel’s blood beneath his nails and promised to stand beside him where the entire world could see.

And Daniel could picture it.

Not their old relationship. Not the boy he had been finding his way back through the missing years. Not some reconstructed romance assembled from Armand’s memories and Daniel’s faint recollection.

Daniel has chosen him.

Present tense.

Active voice.

Suddenly a thought struck him with all the grace of a car slamming into a concrete barrier.

Armand’s eyes narrowed. The bond had likely conveyed some fraction of the dawning horror.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Daniel.”

“Don’t ruin it.”

Armand’s claws pressed deeper.

Daniel let out what could only generously be described as a pathetic little whimper and this new forming conclusion continued to press in on him.

Armand was a horrific unlovable monster according to basically all outside sources.

And Daniel…

He was profoundly fucked in the head.

The sheer conviction behind Armand’s declaration—

His claim over Daniel—

Daniel understood right there, and with no small amount growing consternation…

He absolutely could.

He could fall in love with him again.

“Do you understand?” Armand asked blessedly breaking up Daniel’s train of thought.

Daniel looked at him. At his amber eyes darkened nearly to black. Daniel’s own eyes forever an exact mirror.

“Yeah, boss,” he croaked out. “I understand.”

Armand smiled. More a baring of teeth than anything else.

Daniel’s back struck the cushions as Armand pushed him down, one hand remaining tangled in his hair while the other slid beneath his shirt. They made out with the frantic indignity of teenagers on somebody’s parents’ couch instead of two old men with a combined age approaching six centuries.

Daniel’s last coherent thought before Armand bit into his mouth was that he still needed to enter the guest name into the email.

His second-to-last was that asking Armand to attend had been the difficult part. Getting him to behave like merely a plus-one would be impossible.

And the third was:

Yeah.

I’m absolutely fucked.

r/AskHR • Posted by u/ThrowRA_MythicalBoss • 6 hr. ago

My elderly boss insists he is a mythical creature, and I’m worried we’re enabling him.

Throwaway because this is specific enough that I’m probably violating an NDA just by typing it.

I recently joined the team for a major project. The subject/producer/director is an elderly man. He is intelligent, articulate, and still extremely involved in every decision, but he also insists that he is literally a vampire.

Not metaphorically. Not as a marketing strategy. He corrects people when they refer to it as fiction and expects his staff to schedule around his “feeding,” aversion to sunlight, etc.

Nobody senior to me challenges this. We have all been instructed to treat the claim as factual and accommodate it. I am genuinely worried we’re participating in the delusions of someone with dementia or another neurological condition. It feels unethical, especially because the documentary itself reinforces the belief.

The complication is that the salary is fantastic, the health insurance is the best I’ve ever had, all overtime is paid, and he is otherwise a much better boss than most people I’ve worked for.

Do I report this? Quit? Continue playing along? At what point does accommodation become exploitation?

EDIT: Please stop guessing who it is.

12.4k Upvotes  1.8k Comments  Share  Save

u/DeepCutDocumentaries • 5 hr. ago

Imagine this is about Daniel Molloy.

8.7k Reply Share

u/ThrowRA_MythicalBoss OP • 5 hr. ago

It is not about Daniel Molloy.

11.2k Reply Share

u/DeepCutDocumentaries • 5 hr. ago

That is exactly what someone working for Daniel Molloy would have to say.

14.9k Reply Share

u/NoUnionNoPeace • 4 hr. ago

Does your boss have two Pulitzers and a documented history of recreational drug use, or are we discussing a second elderly investigative journalist currently claiming to drink human blood?

9.6k Reply Share

u/ClinicalEthicsMaybe • 4 hr. ago

An Alzheimer’s patient generally cannot executive-produce a documentary, negotiate distribution, and personally argue with legal over archival rights.

6.3k Reply Share

u/NoUnionNoPeace • 4 hr. ago

That does not make him a vampire.

8.1k Reply Share

u/VampireTruther1967 • 3 hr. ago

Have you considered that your boss is telling the truth and you are discriminating against the undead?

4.8k Reply Share

u/ThrowRA_MythicalBoss OP • 3 hr. ago

No.

10.7k Reply Share

u/VampireTruther1967 • 3 hr. ago

Typical.

12.1k Reply Share

---

The production meeting began at five-thirty in the evening.

This had already required three rounds of scheduling emails, two complaints from the publicity department, and a proposed compromise in which Daniel would join remotely from a room with the curtains closed.

Apparently, asking a production team promoting a documentary about vampires to meet after sunset was an intolerable concession to eccentricity.

They had eventually settled on a conference room in the production company’s Manhattan office. Funnily enough the meeting room, while not being in any direct exposure to the sun, was made of glass walls, had a glass table, and even glass doors. A transparent little box designed to assure everyone that no secret decisions were being made while providing excellent acoustics for making secret decisions.

Daniel arrived six minutes late with Armand beside him.

Armand considered lateness a character defect. Daniel considered arriving exactly on time an admission that the other person controlled your schedule. Six minutes represented a mature compromise.

The room was already full. Publicists, producers, festival coordinators, distribution representatives, an increasingly anxious tour manager, two assistants, three people whose job titles contained the word strategy, and one executive who had introduced herself to Daniel four separate times without ever remembering that they had met.

Conversation stopped when he entered.

Not because of Daniel.

Well, not entirely because of Daniel.

Armand wore black trousers, a soft cream shirt open at the throat, and a jacket cut close enough to make the gathered humans briefly forget their professional obligations. He looked approximately twenty-five. Twenty-three in forgiving light. Nineteen if he widened his eyes and committed to the act.

Daniel knew better.

The production team did not.

“This is Armand,” Daniel said once everyone had settled. “My partner. He’ll be accompanying me to Cannes as my plus-one and joining us for the release tour.”

There.

Publicly together.

It came out easily this time.

The room’s thoughts erupted around them.

Daniel’s own ability to pick up human minds remained inconsistent. Crowded rooms usually gave him more impression than language—bursts of feeling, scattered images, the psychic equivalent of trying to understand ten radio stations broadcasting through one damaged speaker.

A few thoughts arrived with remarkable clarity.

Holy shit, is Daniel Molloy this twink’s sugar daddy?

He cannot possibly be older than twenty-five.

Armand? Like his book character? Is this a kink thing?

And, from the scheduling assistant seated near the back:

Damn. Okay. Get it, peepaw.

Daniel liked her immediately.

Beside him, Armand’s expression remained smooth and politely attentive. The slight brightening behind his eyes suggested he had heard every word.

Of course he had.

“Welcome,” the tour manager said after recovering first. Her name was Mara, and she had the increasingly brittle cheerfulness of someone who had spent the previous month attempting to schedule a man who claimed noon was a medical emergency. “We’ve prepared the current Cannes itinerary, along with the proposed accommodations, transportation schedule, and preliminary press requests.”

A thick folder waited at each seat.

Armand looked at his as though someone had presented him with an improperly cleaned surgical instrument.

Daniel sat. Armand took the chair immediately beside him, close enough that their knees touched beneath the glass table.

Mara began with the hotel.

The production company had reserved Daniel a suite at a large property near the festival venues. Convenient location. Private entrance. On-site security. Press rooms available inside the building. Several members of the distribution team were staying there as well, which would simplify transportation.

Armand opened the folder.

“What direction does the suite face?”

Mara paused. “The ocean.”

“That was not my question.”

“The windows face south,” one of the coordinators supplied after consulting her laptop.

Armand turned a page. “What ultraviolet filtration has been applied to the glass?”

Another pause.

“They’re standard hotel windows,” Mara said.

“There is no standard amount of ultraviolet filtration.” Armand said simply.

“The suite has blackout curtains.”

“What manufacturer?”

“I’m sorry?” Mara sputtered. Looking increasingly more frazzled as Armand’s interrogation went on. Daniel should probably step in to save the poor woman.

He did not.

“The curtains. Who manufactured them?”

Mara looked toward the festival coordinator.

The festival coordinator looked toward her assistant.

The assistant began typing with the intensity of someone attempting to prevent an execution.

Armand continued before she found an answer.

“Are they recessed into the wall or mounted above the frame? Is there light leakage at the base? Can the curtains be secured during housekeeping? Does hotel staff retain independent access to the room? Is the private entrance interior or exterior? How long is Daniel exposed while traveling between the vehicle and that entrance?”

No one answered.

Daniel leaned back in his chair.

Three minutes.

It had taken Armand three minutes to make an entire professional production team look like children who had forgotten to complete their homework. Which was unfair to them. Vampires usually aren’t a standard part of the usual curriculum.

Daniel would have found it obnoxious if it were not so deeply attractive.

“Mr. Molloy’s current suite is one of the best available,” Mara said carefully.

“No,” Armand replied. “It is one of the best available to you.”

There it was.

The room recalculated.

The initial assumption had been obvious: Daniel Molloy, wealthy older journalist and recent best-seller, had acquired a beautiful young boyfriend and brought him to a business meeting because boundaries deteriorated with age.

Now the boyfriend was speaking to the production company as though their budget were an unfortunate miscalculation.

Armand removed his phone from his pocket.

“The Hôtel Belladone has a secured interior garage, private lift access, and three suites fitted with archival glass to protect the artwork displayed inside them. The eastern suite has already been held under my name. There is also a private property outside the city should the festival security prove inadequate, though the additional travel time makes it the less desirable option.”

The Hôtel Belladone was one of those establishments Daniel had only heard of because its management repeatedly denied that it existed.

Mara’s expression tightened. “That property is considerably outside our accommodations budget.”

“There are no worries,” Armand said. “I will pay for it. Take care to use my name for all registrations. You will encounter no difficulty with the booking that way.”

He said it without emphasis. No bragging. No performance of generosity. Simply a practical fact offered to people who had made an error he was now correcting.

The room’s assumptions shifted again.

Wait. He’s rich?

How rich?

Is Daniel the sugar baby?

Can someone be a geriatric sugar baby?

The scheduling assistant in the back was having the best evening of her professional life.

Daniel looked at Armand.

Armand did not look back, though the corner of his mouth moved just enough to confirm that he knew Daniel was watching.

So yes.

Mark Daniel down as a hypocritical and horny champagne socialist.

He objected to obscene concentrations of private wealth. He had spent large portions of his career exposing the structures that created them. He could and had delivered multiple lectures on inherited capital, labor exploitation, and the social corrosion caused by people who confused money with virtue.

It nevertheless did something to him when Armand casually established his wealth and power.

Not the money itself.

The control.

Everyone in the room had looked at Armand and constructed the same convenient story: young, beautiful, dependent, decorative. Daniel’s indulgence. A body brought along because an old man wanted something attractive beside him.

Then Armand spoke, and the story collapsed.

Now they were all trying to calculate precisely how badly they had misunderstood the balance of power.

Daniel could have told them.

They would only misunderstand it in a more complicated direction.

“Moving on,” Mara said, with the haunted determination of someone attempting to preserve an agenda after the meeting had already been annexed. “Ground transportation.”

Armand turned the page.

The itinerary included airport transfers, hotel arrivals, daily transport to interviews, a press event at the beach, the premiere, the after-party, and several provisional appearances still awaiting confirmation.

“What vehicles?” Armand asked.

“Luxury SUVs.”

“Which vehicles?”

The transportation coordinator named a manufacturer.

“Factory glass?”

“Yes.”

“Replace them.”

“With what?”

Armand listed another manufacturer, a specific model, the required modifications to its windows, and the name of a security transport company whose services apparently included armored vehicles, counter-surveillance, and drivers trained in evasive maneuvering.

Mara stared at him.

“We’re not extracting him from an embassy.” She tried to push back.

Big mistake. Huge.

“No. An embassy would have fewer uncontrolled entrances.” Armand said snidely leveling an extremely unimpressed look her way.

Daniel pressed his lips together.

Across the table, the scheduling assistant abruptly looked down at her notes.

The tour manager turned toward Daniel, perhaps hoping to locate the reasonable adult in the relationship.

Mistake number two.

“Daniel,” she said, “the existing transportation plan is standard for this kind of tour.”

“Standard for people who don’t combust,” Daniel shot back, mostly for the sport of it.

Really, he felt bad for these people. They were only trying to do their jobs and had somehow ended up trapped inside Armand and Daniel’s idea of fun. But Daniel was an asshole first and foremost, and he was thoroughly enjoying their suffering.

The legal representative shifted uncomfortably.

Nobody on the production team knew whether they were supposed to laugh at remarks like that. Daniel had discovered the uncertainty could last several seconds if he kept his expression neutral.

Worth it every time.

Armand continued reviewing the itinerary.

“What is this?”

He placed one finger beside an entry scheduled for twelve-thirty on the second afternoon.

“Beachfront press,” the publicity director said. “It’s a short interview. Fifteen minutes, maximum. The press line will be shaded.”

“By what?”

“A canopy.”

“What material?”

The publicity director blinked. “Canvas?”

“What ultraviolet protection does the canvas provide?”

Silence again.

Mara looked like she was contemplating handing in her notice then and there.

Armand looked at Daniel.

Not dramatically. He merely turned his eyes toward him and let them settle on the skin above Daniel’s collar, as if assessing damage that had not yet occurred.

Daniel felt the familiar mixture of irritation and reluctant relief.

The production company thought vampirism was a publicity strategy. They would happily place him outside at midday beneath decorative fabric because he, of course couldn’t actually be a vampire.

Ha.

Burgeoning day walker or not Armand knew exactly how quickly Mediterranean sunlight could go from unpleasant to catastrophic.

He also knew Daniel would insist he was fine until some part of him actively caught fire.

“The beachfront interview will be moved,” Armand said.

The publicity director straightened. “That slot was negotiated with forty-seven outlets.”

“Then forty-seven outlets will receive a revised time.”

“We can reduce the appearance to five minutes.”

“No.”

Daniel turned slightly toward him.

Armand had used his calm voice. The dangerous one. The voice that made a refusal sound less like a position in an active discussion and more like a factual condition the universe would now be required to accommodate.

The publicity director looked toward Daniel.

This was the boundary.

Armand understood Daniel better than anyone in the room. That did not make him Daniel’s editor, spokesperson, or professional guardian.

Daniel tapped the relevant line on the itinerary.

“He’s right about the time,” he said. “Move it to dusk.”

Mara exhaled through her nose.

“But,” Daniel added, before Armand could enjoy the victory too completely, “he does not approve interview questions, choose which journalists I speak to, or answer on my behalf.”

Several people looked between them.

Armand did not appear offended.

“That is correct,” he said.

The easy acknowledgment surprised Daniel enough that he briefly distrusted it.

Armand’s knee pressed against his beneath the table.

Not a warning.

Recognition.

This part is mine. That part remains yours.

Good.

The publicity director made a note.

The next issue was wardrobe.

They had prepared a digital lookbook and arranged fittings with several designers eager to dress Daniel for the premiere. Apparently, his new found infamy due to exposing a species of immortal predators had finally qualified him to wear a jacket he could not afford without signing a loan agreement.

The stylist slid a tablet across the table.

Armand intercepted it before Daniel touched it.

Daniel leaned toward him. “I’m capable of looking at clothes.”

“You are capable of looking at them,” Armand agreed.

“Meaning?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

Armand began scrolling.

The stylist watched with the rigid patience of someone accustomed to wealthy clients and unaccustomed to wealthy clients’ boyfriends conducting inspections.

“No,” Armand said.

The stylist frowned. “That’s the first option.”

“Yes.”

He moved to the second.

“No.”

The third.

“No.”

Daniel looked at the ceiling.

“Are we developing a theme?” He sighed.

“The shoulders are wrong.” Armand returned, still not looking at him and instead scrunching his nose at whatever garment he had found offensive.

“They’re digital sketches.” He pointed out.

“The shoulders will remain wrong when constructed.” Armand stated.

The stylist leaned forward. “That house has dressed heads of state.”

“Many heads of state dress poorly.”

Daniel covered his mouth with one hand.

Armand continued.

“This color makes him appear ill.”

“I’m dead,” Daniel said. “Little late to worry about that.”

Armand glanced at him. “You need not advertise it through tailoring.”

The scheduling assistant made a small choking noise from the back of the room.

The stylist reclaimed the tablet. “We have relationships with these designers.”

“As do I.”

Of course he did.

Armand named two couture houses, one tailor in London, and a private atelier in Milan that the stylist clearly recognized despite trying not to react.

“The fittings will occur in New York after sunset,” he said. “I will provide Daniel’s measurements.”

“You have my measurements memorized?”

Armand finally looked at him.

Daniel reconsidered the question.

“Never mind.”

“Wise.”

Personal manager. Assistant. Stylist.

They were accumulating job titles rapidly.

The meeting moved to security.

The production company had hired a local firm to manage the premiere and public appearances. Daniel had never needed security before and it felt even more redundant now that he was an actual vampire. However, after Lestat’s attempted assassination via vampire groupie and Daniel’s documentary already pissing more people off than his book did, security was probably a good idea.

Armand requested personnel records, venue layouts, entry maps, rooftop access reports, emergency routes, and the names of everyone authorized to enter Daniel’s hotel floor.

The security coordinator objected that some information could not be shared with an outside guest.

Armand smiled.

Small. Courteous. No teeth.

The coordinator began gathering the requested documents.

Daniel watched it happen with professional interest.

No supernatural compulsion. Armand had not needed it. He had simply looked at the man as though refusal were a disappointing answer Armand would generously permit him to reconsider.

Daniel knew that technique.

He had used a less beautiful version of it in interviews for forty years.

“Daniel will also require feeding access before and after prolonged appearances,” Armand said.

The room became very quiet.

The legal representative stopped writing.

Mara chose her next words carefully. “By feeding access, are we referring to catering?”

“No.”

“Armand,” Daniel said.

“What?”

“You enjoy doing that.”

“I am attempting to avoid ambiguity.”

“You’re creating a much more interesting kind of ambiguity.”

The tour manager rubbed one temple.

“We have dietary accommodations listed,” she said. “No solid food during working hours and a private refrigerated unit in the suite.”

“What temperature?”

She stared at him.

“The refrigerator.”

“I don’t know.”

“Then you do not know whether the accommodation is adequate.”

“We can confirm the specifications.”

“You will.”

Armand took the pen from beside Daniel’s folder and began marking the itinerary.

Feeding before departure. Recovery time after daylight exposure. No extended appearances without access to a private room. No unscheduled human contact after Daniel had gone more than a certain number of hours without blood.

That final restriction was probably sensible.

Daniel still objected on principle.

“I’m sitting right here.”

“Yes.”

“You’re discussing me like a zoo animal.”

“A zoo would maintain a more responsible feeding schedule.”

“Asshole.”

“You fed late yesterday, became irritable, and attempted to bite an irrate pedestrian.”

“He deserved it.”

“He asked whether vampirism was an allegory for being a homosexual.”

“He said it in a very patronizing way.”

The legal representative closed her eyes.

The production team definitely thought Armand was an alarmingly controlling boyfriend and were probably choosing to ignore any of the vampire “role-play” they were doing.

Daniel knew Armand was more then just an alarmingly controlling boyfriend he was also a five-hundred-year-old vampire with a long history of confusing care, mind control, unwanted “protection”, and ownership until the terms became functionally interchangeable.

Both interpretations were correct.

Neither accounted for the inconvenient fact that Armand was also the only person in the room who fully understood what Daniel needed.

The production team saw an elderly man refusing daytime appearances.

Armand saw skin beginning to redden beneath reflected sunlight.

They saw eccentric eating requirements.

Armand saw the slight lag in Daniel’s concentration when hunger began to sharpen, the restlessness in his hands, the point at which irritation stopped being personality and became appetite.

They saw a client who had interviewed KGB agents with no more than a raised eyebrow now claim he had been murdered then turned into an undead creature of the night.

Armand was his murderer.

That gave his anxiety a certain evidentiary basis even if Daniel was hesitant to acknowledge it.

The meeting continued.

Within forty minutes, Armand had replaced the hotel, transport company, security team, primary stylist, two interview locations, three press times, the refrigeration equipment, and the person responsible for confirming the UV rating of every window Daniel would pass within twenty feet of.

He had also requested the complete press list, acquired the direct phone number of the festival’s head of security, and somehow obtained architectural plans for the primary screening venue while Mara was still explaining that they would need to submit a formal request.

Nobody could determine what his actual function in Daniel’s life was because boyfriend failed to cover the administrative scope they had witness Armand exert over his life.

Helicopter parent briefly occurred to Daniel, but the implied incest was too weird now that they were actually fucking to take seriously.

Helicopter maker.

There.

Disturbing, specific, and unfortunately accurate.

The itinerary on the screen at the front of the room no longer resembled the document everyone had received at the beginning. Half the afternoon entries were gone. Evening events had shifted later. Travel buffers had doubled. Red blocks now marked periods during which Daniel was apparently to be fed, monitored, dressed, transported, or placed somewhere dark until Armand considered him fit for public consumption.

Daniel had objected to nearly every change.

He had also approved most of them.

Empirical judgment.

Armand was overbearing. He was invasive. He had entered the meeting as a plus-one and staged a bloodless coup before anyone served coffee.

He was also right about the hotel windows.

Right about the beach.

Right about the transportation.

Daniel hated when that happened.

Mara stood at the front of the room, staring at the revised schedule with the hollow expression of a woman watching several weeks of labor lowered into an open grave.

“We still have one significant conflict,” she said.

She highlighted a block across the middle of the third day.

“The international broadcast partners have coordinated a live press forum beginning at one. We have outlets joining from twelve countries. The venue and satellite windows are already secured.”

“Move it,” Armand said.

“We can’t move twelve international broadcasters.”

“You will.”

“The midday slot is the only one that accommodates every region.”

“Then every region will be disappointed together.”

Mara’s jaw tightened. “Mr. Molloy is obligated to appear in all reasonable press that the Cannes filmmakers are contractually required to participate in.”

Armand placed both hands flat on the table.

The movement was quiet.

Every person in the room stopped shifting.

“Daniel will not be available during the middle of the day under any circumstances.”

Mara looked toward Daniel.

Daniel considered the schedule.

One o’clock. Southern France. Summer.

He thought of heat pressing into his skin. Armand’s blood working through him like a temporary shield. The peculiar dry warning beneath the flesh before pain arrived.

He could endure it.

Probably.

Daniel had built a career on the word probably.

Armand’s hand moved beneath the table and closed around Daniel’s knee.

Daniel sighed.

“No midday appearances,” he said. “Find another satellite window or tell them I can’t make it.”

Mara opened her mouth.

Armand’s fingers tightened once.

Daniel looked directly at her.

“That part isn’t branding.”

Something in his voice finally reached her.

The protest disappeared.

“All right,” she said. “No midday appearances.”

Armand released his knee.

The meeting ended nineteen minutes later.

By the time Daniel and Armand reached the elevator, three revised hotel confirmations had arrived, the specialized transportation company had accepted the booking, and the private atelier in Milan had requested Daniel’s availability for a remote consultation.

Daniel stared at Armand.

“You understand you were invited as my plus-one.”

“Yes.”

“You just replaced the production company’s entire Cannes operation.”

“It was inadequate.”

“You threatened a security contractor.”

“I corrected his misunderstanding.”

“You told twelve international broadcasters to go fuck themselves.”

“I was considerably more polite.”

The elevator doors opened.

Armand stepped inside and turned to face him.

“Daniel.”

“What?”

“You asked me to accompany you.”

“I’m beginning to understand the scale of my mistake.”

Armand smiled and held out one hand.

Daniel took it anyway.

DEUXMOI SUBMISSION — ANON PLEASE

Daniel Molloy’s alleged “plus-one” just took over his entire Cannes operation

Anonymous submission

I work for a company involved in Daniel Molloy’s upcoming documentary, and I need everyone to know about the INSANE production meeting we just had.

Daniel brought his new boyfriend/partner/dominatrix, who looks about twenty-two and is possibly the most beautiful and terrifying person I have ever seen.

Daniel introduced him as his Cannes plus-one.

Within ten minutes, this man had:

• canceled Daniel’s hotel
• booked a secret rich-person hotel nobody on our team could afford to enter
• replaced all the cars with Secret Service-style SUVs
• rejected the entire wardrobe lookbook
• demanded architectural plans for multiple venues
• reorganized Daniel’s “feeding schedule”
• told international broadcasters they could move their live slot
• informed us Daniel is not allowed outside at noon

He paid for EVERYTHING before accounting could object.

Nobody knows whether he is Daniel’s boyfriend, manager, assistant, stylist, doctor, security detail, or legal guardian.

Molloy complained the entire time and then agreed with almost every decision.

The boyfriend also kept touching Daniel under the table, which we could all see in perfect HD because it was a GLASS TABLE.

The working theory is that Daniel Molloy is a sugar daddy being held hostage by his own sugar baby.

Personally, I think the young one is the daddy.

Also, I am now 70% sure they are actually vampires.

Submitted 42 minutes ago  3.8K reactions  846 comments

velvetropes • 38 min ago
“boyfriend/partner/dominatrix” narrowed it down to absolutely nothing.

7.2K likes Reply

pulitzerprincess • 34 min ago
Daniel Molloy getting publicly managed by a twink who looks twenty-two is the most believable part of this.

5.9K likes Reply

nightislandtruthers • 31 min ago
That man does not look twenty-two. He looks like he was painted onto the wall of a monastery in 1486.

8.4K likes Reply

glasshousegossip • 29 min ago
Sorry, nobody noticed the GLASS TABLE until after the meeting?

6.1K likes Reply

anonindustryrat • 27 min ago
They noticed. They were pretending not to notice.

9.7K likes Reply

cinemortis • 22 min ago
“Daniel is not allowed outside at noon” is either vampire confirmation or the world’s strictest skincare routine.

11.3K likes Reply

sanguinecinema • 18 min ago
The feeding schedule being treated as less alarming than the hotel change is sending me.

4.6K likes Reply

lestatology • 12 min ago
The young one is absolutely the daddy. Hope this helps.

13.8K likes Reply

Daniel had never particularly cared how he dressed.

This had apparently been a moral failing.

At least, that was the impression given by the four designers, two tailors, three assistants, one stylist, and an unidentified woman whose only apparent responsibility was carrying fabric swatches from one side of the room to the other with the solemnity of a nurse transporting an organ for transplant.

Armand had invited all of them to a private studio he apparently owned but had failed to mention to Daniel of course.

Invited was generous. Summoned, probably. Daniel suspected several had crossed international borders on less than twenty-four hours’ notice after Armand informed them—politely, no doubt—that their presence in New York was required.

The space had been transformed into a temporary atelier. Garment bags hung from the molding. Fabric books covered the temporary folding tables. Two portable clothing racks occupied the space in front of the windows, each holding enough formalwear to outfit a small but unusually well-dressed militia.

Daniel stood on a raised fitting platform in trousers, socks, and an unbuttoned shirt while strangers circled him with pins between their lips.

The indignity would have been easier to bear if Armand were not enjoying himself so thoroughly.

His maker sat in an armchair he had placed creepily in a corner, one ankle resting over the opposite knee, directing the proceedings with the relaxed authority of someone who had spent centuries directing a theater and considerably more time never being told no. His iPad rested against one thigh. A cup of blood sat barely touched on the table beside him in a piece of Venetian glass that Daniel had been informed—twice—was not dishwasher safe.

The first jacket was removed.

The second was placed over Daniel’s shoulders.

Armand frowned.

Not a dramatic frown. One tiny compression between the brows. The tailor saw it anyway and began apologizing before Armand spoke.

“The waist is too wide.”

“It has not been altered yet,” the tailor said.

“It should not be altered into the wrong shape.”

Daniel looked toward the ceiling.

“We’re off to a strong start.”

Armand ignored him. “The shoulder extends too far. It makes him appear smaller.”

“Im an old man. I am smaller,” Daniel said.

“You need not be made to appear so.”

“Thanks.” He said dryly.

The tailor began marking adjustments anyways. Smart man.

One of the designers stepped forward with a dark silk shirt draped over her arm. “We thought this beneath the dinner jacket. The collar can be worn open.”

Armand reached out and rubbed the fabric between his fingers.

Daniel watched him do it.

There was nothing unusual in the gesture. Armand tested everything that might touch Daniel’s skin as though the material had applied for a privileged position and its references remained under review.

Still, something about the shirt—the dark sheen of it, perhaps, or the way Armand’s thumb passed slowly across the collar—made an old discomfort stir beneath Daniel’s ribs.

Armand looked at him.

“You would like this.”

Not a question.

Daniel’s jaw tightened before he could stop it.

The designer remained beside them, holding the shirt and smiling professionally. She could not have known the sentence contained a land mine. Armand might not have known either.

No. That was generous. Armand generally knew where the land mines were. He simply had a complicated relationship with the belief that noticing danger meant he had the right to determine how close Daniel stood to it.

“You think?” Daniel asked a bit too sharply.

Armand’s gaze remained on the fabric. “You have always preferred silk.”

There it was.

Always.

One careless word, and the room disappeared beneath the memory of another room, another garment held between Armand’s hands, and the first time Armand had begun to dress the younger version of himself like a doll.

—

In his youth, most people Daniel traded favors with had not cared what he looked like with his clothes on.

They had been considerably more interested in what happened once the clothes came off.

That had simplified his wardrobe. Band T-shirts. Canvas jackets. Worn-in jeans. Leather if he was trying to score—or trying to look like the sort of person who could score without effort, which was a different and more labor-intensive activity.

It probably was not until his mid-thirties, when Alice informed him that he could under absolutely no circumstances wear an ill-fitting suit from a department-store clearance rack to accept a Pulitzer, that Daniel invested a measurable amount of thought in his closet.

By then, the clothes that had served him through Berkeley, San Francisco, drugs, protests, interviews, and the first uncertain years of his career had become unsuitable.

That was the word Alice used.

Suitable.

Suitable for a husband. Suitable for a father. Suitable for an increasingly respected investigative journalist who could no longer appear at professional events dressed like he might leave halfway through to purchase amphetamines behind the venue.

Daniel had fought the wardrobe change with a level of commitment disproportionate to the issue. Stubbornness for the sake of stubbornness, mostly. Alice had once found that quality charming. Over time, it had worn her patience down grain by grain until there was nothing left but sharp edges and a locked home-office door with divorce papers pushed beneath it.

But not all of Daniel’s resistance had been contrarianism.

There had been the jacket.

Old leather, softened nearly to cloth at the elbows, one pocket torn along the lining. And a band T-shirt purchased for a concert Daniel could not remember attending, though he had apparently cared enough to spend money he could not spare on the merchandise.

Every time Alice tried to place either item into the donation box, something in Daniel’s chest twisted.

No memory attached itself to the reaction. No image. No explanation.

Just loss without an object.

He kept both.

Alice donated the rest and began rebuilding his closet from respectable basics: button-down shirts, neutral sweaters, jackets that fit correctly, trousers that did not look as though Daniel had slept in them beneath a bridge.

Daniel fought her over every addition until the afternoon she stood in their bedroom clutching a pale blue shirt with tears bright in her eyes.

“Daniel, our daughter is one,” she said. “You have an actual stable career, and you still show up to collect her from daycare looking like you’re about to meet your dealer on a street corner! I’m tired of people looking at us and then looking at me with pity. Please. Can’t you just do this one thing?”

That had ended the argument.

Because Daniel had been meeting his dealer on a street corner before collecting their daughter.

Not every time.

Just—

Often enough.

By the time Daniel became a recognizable name in his field, clothing had ceased to be his problem. He had publicists. Assistants. Interns dispatched to purchase whatever met the dress code for the gala, lecture, signing, awards ceremony, or televised panel Daniel had agreed to attend and immediately forgotten.

By seventy, twice divorced and estranged enough from his daughters that neither cared what occupied his closet, Daniel had returned to not giving a shit.

The world did not especially care either.

Armand cared though.

Armand cared a bit too much.

The first time Armand opened Daniel’s closet after moving into the brownstone, he stood before it in complete silence for nearly a minute.

Then he closed the door very carefully and turned slowly toward Daniel.

The expression on his face contained the pure, undiluted revulsion of a man who had witnessed wars, plagues, public executions, and centuries of cult leadership only to discover that true horror was a polyester-blend sport coat.

Within a month, the only left over guest bedroom had been commandeered.

Apparently, the existence of Daniel’s closet had created an emergency requiring significant architectural intervention. The room acquired custom cabinetry, illuminated rails, cedar-lined drawers, an entire wall of shoes, and a climate-control system Daniel suspected was more sophisticated than the one preserving the Declaration of Independence.

It’s not like Daniel had guests over anyways so it wasn’t much of a loss. It became a shared closet.

Technically.

Most of the clothes that were his had been chosen by Armand.

Handmade suits. Cashmere coats. Shirts constructed from fabrics Daniel had not known could possess national origins. Belts advertised as ethically sourced, which seemed like a strange line to draw when the two people wearing them regularly hunted and consumed human beings.

Among the immaculate rows hung an old leather jacket.

Beside it, the band T-shirt.

Cleaned. Repaired. Perfectly pressed and carefully displayed among “basics” worth more than Daniel’s entire apartment building.

The sight had affected him more than he admitted.

Naturally, that made what happened next worse.

Their first serious fight began with Armand laying out an outfit across their bed. Wanting to dress Daniel for their night out.

They had tickets for a movie at one of those stupidly expensive movie theaters with the massage chairs. Apparently Armand didn’t trust him to dress the part.

A black silk shirt. Narrow trousers with a higher waist than Daniel normally wore. A jacket Daniel had never seen and yet somehow recognized.

Not visually.

His body knew it.

The knowledge arrived as pressure against the ribs. The remembered weight of the collar across the back of his neck. Armand’s fingers sliding beneath it. A younger body turning willingly at the sound of Armand’s voice.

Daniel stood in the bedroom doorway and stared.

Armand smoothed one hand along the collar.

“I had it restored.”

“Whose is it?”

Daniel already knew. The question was an exit, offered plainly enough that Armand could recognize it and take it. Lie. Reconsider. Put the thing away and spare them both whatever conversation waited on the other side of the truth.

Armand looked up.

“Yours.”

“No.”

The answer came too quickly.

Armand blinked. “Daniel—”

“No. Absolutely not.” Daniel stepped back from the threshold, one hand tightening around the edge of the doorframe as though the room had shifted beneath him.

Armand’s hand stilled against the collar. His head tilted slightly, his confusion so nakedly genuine that it only made Daniel angrier.

“I do not understand.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that.”

Armand glanced down at the clothes, then back at Daniel. “The shirt was yours too. You were fond of it.”

Daniel folded his arms.

“Put it away.”

“Why?”

“Because I said no,” Daniel said, each word clipped clean.

“You have not even touched it.”

“I don’t need to touch it.”

“You used to enjoy this, beloved.”

God, that name again.

They had discussed this. Armand had slipped back into the old endearments almost immediately once they began sleeping together, as though getting Daniel into bed had restored more than the shirt. As though beloved had been sitting somewhere in storage too, carefully preserved and waiting for Armand to decide it belonged to him again.

But Daniel wasn’t Armand’s beloved.

Armand had seen to that himself.

“Jesus Christ, don’t call me that!”

Armand’s expression tightened.

“We’ve talked about this,” Daniel continued. “You don’t get to pull out the old pet names whenever you’re feeling nostalgic.”

“It is not nostalgia,” Armand said, his voice carefully controlled.

“It’s what you called me.” Daniel emphasized each word, trying to force them through whatever wall Armand had already begun constructing between hearing and understanding. He could see how this was going to go. Armand had that stubborn set to his jaw, the one that meant he had decided the distinction mattered and intended to defend it until language itself surrendered.

“Yes.”

“When I was somebody else.”

“No,” Armand said. The correction came softly but immediately. “You were Daniel.”

“Stop,” Daniel said sternly.

“You were yourself!” Armand argued back, his voice rising just enough to make the words strike rather than land.

“Stop fucking telling me who I used to be!”

The words cracked across the bedroom.

Hard.

Armand went still.

Daniel’s fangs had descended without him noticing. His hands were clenched against his arms, claws pressing crescents through the sleeves of his shirt.

“I don’t remember that,” he said. “Any of it. I don’t remember wearing that. I don’t remember you giving it to me. I don’t remember whether I loved it or fucking hated it and wore it because you wanted me to.”

“You loved it,” Armand asserted, as though certainty could substitute for proof.

“According to you.”

The words landed as intended.

Armand’s face emptied.

Daniel hated that expression. The perfect blankness. The moment Armand withdrew behind something smooth and impenetrable and left Daniel arguing with a locked door.

He kept going anyway.

“You keep doing this. You tell me what I liked. What I wanted. How I used to respond when you touched me.” Daniel began pacing in a tight circle beside the bed, unable to stand still with the anger moving through him. “You hand me these little pieces of him and act like I should recognize myself.”

“You do recognize them,” Armand insisted.

“That isn’t the point.” Daniel stopped and turned toward him, one hand cutting sharply through the air to emphasize the words.

“Then what is?”

“The point is that I don’t know why.”

Daniel’s voice had lowered. Anger made it quieter. Cleaner.

“This could be mine. It could be the bond. It could be blood memory. It could be you feeding me a version of myself until my body starts filling in the blanks. I don’t know, because you made sure I wouldn’t know.”

Armand stared at him.

Daniel stepped closer to the bed and picked up the leather jacket by the collar. The leather was old but immaculate. Preserved for four decades while Daniel forgot it existed.

“You don’t get to hand me pieces of the boy you erased and call that knowing me.”

Armand flinched.

Small. Real.

Good.

Daniel hated himself immediately for thinking it.

Not enough to take the sentence back.

“I did not preserve these things to control you,” Armand said, frustration finally breaking through the careful restraint of his voice.

“Here we go.” Daniel rolled his eyes.

Did Armand think he was stupid? Daniel had been there when Louis discovered the Steins Armand had placed in his collection to fuck with his head. Armand did not preserve objects innocently. He curated them, positioned them, waited for someone to notice, and then acted surprised when the arrangement produced exactly the response he had intended.

“They belonged to you.”

“They belonged to somebody I can’t remember being.”

“You are still him!”

“No.”

The word came out flat.

Armand’s pupils contracted.

“I’m not that fucking kid anymore,” Daniel spat. “And you have no right to be hurt about that. You don’t get to stand there looking like I abandoned you when you’re the reason I can’t remember staying.”

Armand’s lips parted.

Nothing followed.

Daniel threw the jacket back onto the bed.

His shoulders rose and fell with breaths his body did not need. Habit, panic, anger. The old mammalian machinery still cycling through emergency procedures three years after death had made most of them irrelevant.

For a moment, he could see what Armand was looking at.

Not Daniel as he stood there now—older, harder, furious, dressed in an ancient band shirt and sweatpants—but the outline of the boy who had once worn those clothes. The boy Armand had loved. The boy Armand had pursued, used, kept, lost, erased.

The boy Armand had murdered so Daniel could become the man Armand later murdered more literally.

Daniel looked away and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Listen. We can’t do this.”

Armand flinched.

Recoiled really.

“Not like that,” he said quickly, gesturing between them. “I mean not like this. We can’t just pick up where we left off.”

Armand’s face remained still, but hurt pressed across the bond. Dense. Immediate. Daniel felt it beneath his sternum as though somebody had driven a fist between his ribs and left it there.

He resented that.

He resented more that some traitorous part of him wanted to cross the room, put his arms around Armand, and apologize for the consequences of Armand’s own decisions.

Daniel lowered his hand.

“I want this,” he said. “I want you to be my maker. I want to be your companion. I want you.”

The admissions entered the room one at a time.

No joke to soften them. No qualification yet.

Armand’s gaze sharpened.

“But we can’t be them,” Daniel continued. “I can’t be him for you. I don’t even know who the hell he was.”

“He was you.” He asserted.

Daniel just sighed. Not rising to the bait. He wouldn’t be the whipping post Armand used to self flagellate himself on for this.

Not again.

Daniel glanced around the bedroom. Armand’s clothes beside his. Daniel’s things restored, purchased, arranged. The old outfit lying across their shared bed like the remains of a body carefully laid out for identification.

“We can’t play house inside the ruins of whatever we had,” Daniel said. “Maybe we both helped burn it down. Fine. I’ve seen enough fragments to know we were probably pouring gasoline on each other for years.”

Armand’s eyes glistened faintly red.

“But you struck the match,” Daniel continued. “You erased the address afterward. Now you keep trying to lead me back there and act surprised when I don’t know the way.”

Silence settled between them.

Armand remained motionless for several beats. The distant quality had left his eyes. He was no longer looking backward through Daniel toward someone missing.

He was looking directly at him.

The attention carried its usual imposing weight. Daniel sometimes wondered whether the heaviness in Armand’s gaze was not something he imposed at all, but simply the accumulated pressure of everything inside him. Five centuries of grief, his own sorrow seeping through the cracks and dripping unconsciously through his gaze alone.

Windows to the soul.

Or whatever bullshit washed-up Elizabethan playwrights and Symbolist movement hippies liked to say.

Daniel began to worry he had gone too far.

Not that he was wrong.

Different concern.

Armand set his jaw and stepped toward him.

It was then Daniel’s turn to flinch.

Barely. A tightening through the shoulders. One involuntary shift of weight backward.

The memory was too recent: Armand crossing an aisle with that same half-haunted, half-apocalyptic look before tearing Daniel’s throat open.

Daniel was not genuinely afraid of him now.

His body had apparently declined to participate in that assertion.

Armand noticed.

Of course he did.

His gaze dropped to Daniel’s feet, tracking the retreat. He stopped immediately, leaving a full foot of space between them.

A small, sorrowful smile touched his mouth.

Daniel almost reached for him.

Then he remembered the blood flooding his lungs. Still unanswered questions. Armand’s continued avoidance of a direct account of why he had turned Daniel and why he had left him afterward.

Fuck it.

Let him sit with it.

Daniel had been sitting with it for three years.

Maybe some vindictive little piece of his younger self—the version revealed only in dreams and echoes—remembered what it had been to exist as the hidden third in Armand and Louis’s immaculate companionship. Wanted. Watched. Kept at a distance suitable for denial.

Present-day Daniel believed more and more Armand had actually loved him.

In his own profoundly fucked-up way.

Present-day Daniel also knew with equal certainty that his younger self had loved Armand.

In an equally fucked-up way.

Honestly, twelve years before the relationship imploded was impressive. Most people could not survive a weekend trip with that much obsession, addiction, secrecy, and unresolved resentment. It was a bit of a miracle Armand had managed more than a decade before reenacting Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on him without consent.

Armand closed his eyes.

When he opened them, something in his expression had changed.

Not acceptance exactly.

Determination.

“Despite your disdain for the form,” he said, “you can be quite poetic when you wish to be.”

Daniel scoffed, though the corner of his mouth betrayed him.

“Yeah, well.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You tend to pull it out of me, I guess.”

It was an admission. A little too raw. A little too real. He was speaking the truth. He’d never waxed poetic, aloud or even in his own head, about any of his previous partners.

The admission was an olive branch. A small one. Possibly diseased.

Armand treated it as though Daniel had offered him the whole tree.

He smiled. A gentle smile. Bashful almost.

God, he was beautiful.

The moonlight entering through the tall bedroom windows caught in his curls and laid pale silver along one side of his face. The shadows should have softened him. Instead, they made his amber eyes appear brighter. Something predatory housed inside an angelic arrangement of features.

Armand crossed the remaining distance slowly.

Daniel did not move back.

Armand lifted one hand. He paused before touching him.

Daniel noticed that too.

Permission reduced to a fraction of a second, but present.

Daniel inclined his head.

Armand brushed the curl resting against Daniel’s cheek behind his ear.

“You are right,” he said. “We are both different people now.”

Daniel waited for the qualification.

Armand’s eyes moved once toward the clothes on the bed.

“It was wrong of me to pretend otherwise.”

The apology was simple enough to be believable.

Daniel had learned to be suspicious whenever Armand became eloquent about remorse. Gardens appeared. Souls developed geographical regions. Every apology acquired architecture and weather until the original offense vanished beneath the landscaping.

This had none of that decoration.

Huh.

Armand leaned closer.

Daniel thought he meant to kiss him. He found himself moving forward to meet him.

Instead, Armand ducked his head just slightly, peering up through his lashes.

The false innocence routine.

Usually Daniel could see the monster operating every muscle beneath it.

However this time Armand actually looked almost shy.

“I would like to woo you again,” he said. “If you would be amenable to it.”

Daniel stared.

Woo him.

They were sleeping in the same bed. Fucking almost daily, sometimes more than once. Daniel had complained that fledglings possessed increased appetites in every sense, but he had not been nearly this insatiable during Armand’s three-year absence.

The evidence suggested less a universal fledgling condition than a Daniel-specific reaction to Armand.

He prepared several responses.

Little late for flowers.

Does getting railed into the floor count as courtship where you come from?

Are we going steady now, boss?

Before he could select the least emotionally revealing option, cool fingers brushed against his hand.

Armand took it carefully.

He lifted Daniel’s knuckles to his mouth and pressed the gentlest kiss imaginable against them.

No seduction. No teeth. No calculated glimpse of tongue.

A chaste, almost ceremonial gesture, as though Daniel were a Victorian debutante and Armand had arrived at the house with honorable intentions after spending the previous evening doing things that would have resulted in both of them being exiled from polite society.

Armand kept his head bowed for another moment.

Then he looked up.

His eyes, usually so predatory when they settled on Daniel, were open and soft.

Fuck.

That affected Daniel almost as much as Armand’s domineering I’m your maker and you will listen to me routine.

Possibly more.

His cold, dead heart gave one brief, traitorous flutter.

The smugness appearing at the edge of Armand’s mouth confirmed he had heard it.

“Don’t,” Daniel warned.

“I said nothing.”

“You were about to.”

“I was not.”

“Your face was.”

Armand’s smile deepened and he released his hand.

Daniel’s cheeks warmed with stolen blood. He suddenly had no idea what to do with either hand, so he shoved them into the pockets of his pants and rocked back slightly on his heels.

Seventy years old. Undead predator. Two Pulitzers.

Blushing like a schoolgirl asked to dance.

“Yeah, boss,” he muttered, looking toward the window. “I’m amenable to that.”

When he looked back, the rims of Armand’s eyes had turned faintly red.

Daniel chose not to comment.

Instead he reached for Armand’s hand again and raised it toward his mouth, attempting to return the same courtly kiss.

His fangs descended.

Naturally.

The useless, oversized things seemed to develop an erection whenever Armand came within five feet of him. One caught against the skin beside Armand’s knuckle and opened the smallest cut.

A bright bead of blood appeared.

Daniel froze.

He had been an addict before death. A serious one. He had spent half an hour on his knees in a cheap motel room searching piss-stained carpet for grains of cocaine too small to confirm were actually cocaine.

However Nothing he ever snorted, smoked, or injected had ever compared with his maker’s blood.

Nothing was as potent. As immediate. As complete.

The intention to kiss Armand’s knuckles chastely survived approximately half a second.

Daniel closed his mouth around the injured finger.

He dragged his tongue from the fingertip down to the knuckle, slow and obscene, making certain he collected every trace. Then he looked up through his lashes with Armand’s hand still held against his mouth.

Armand stared at him.

Stunned.

No.

Starved.

Daniel released the finger and bared his fangs in a dirty, confident grin acquired through age, experience, and decades of pretending he was less affected than he was.

His heart continued pounding loudly enough to expose the performance.

For once, he was almost grateful.

Armand heard the nervousness beneath the provocation.

His answering smile was delighted and wicked.

Then he pushed the same fingers back into Daniel’s mouth.

They hooked behind Daniel’s lower teeth and then pulled.

Daniel stumbled forward into a kiss that would not have been permitted under any Victorian courtship ritual. Armand’s other hand closed around the back of his neck. Daniel caught at his waist, dragging him closer until there was no remaining space for emotional restraint or suitable conduct.

They had barely begun when Armand abruptly caught Daniel’s face between both hands.

His palms compressed Daniel’s cheeks.

Daniel blinked at him, half-hard and breathless despite not requiring air.

“You will allow me to assist you in selecting suitable attire for the festival,” Armand said.

It was not quite worded as a question but he could tell Armand meant it as one nonetheless.

Daniel stared.

Then nodded.

Honestly, he would have agreed to almost anything if Armand returned to kissing him quickly enough.

Armand’s expression brightened into genuine happiness.

“There,” he said, patting Daniel’s cheek as though rewarding a dog for successfully completing a command. “Then it is settled.”

He turned away.

Daniel remained standing where Armand had left him, still processing the shift from face-fucking Daniel with his fingers to administrative victory.

Armand crossed the room and retrieved the iPad abandoned on the bed.

“I have already contacted several designers,” he said, waking the screen. “I believe they can construct a tasteful set of coordinated outfits.”

Daniel opened his mouth.

Armand looked up.

Daniel closed it again.

“Nothing gauche,” Armand continued. “Not like the couple in the adjoining room in Sacramento.”

Pure distaste transformed his face. His nose wrinkled. His brows drew together. He looked personally injured by the memory.

“Coordinated colors,” he said. “Athletic leisurewear. Polyester, certainly. They dressed that way to enter a restaurant.”

Daniel stood half-aroused beside a forty-year-old outfit from a relationship he could not remember while his maker launched into an increasingly passionate critique of strangers’ clothing.

He let the familiar wash of Armand’s irritation settle over him like a blanket.

Apparently, courtship had begun.

—

“Daniel?”

The present returned around him.

The designer still held the dark silk shirt. The tailor remained behind Daniel with one hand hovering near his shoulder. Every person in the living room had gone subtly still, waiting to discover whether You have always preferred silk had somehow been an offense.

Armand was watching him.

Carefully.

He released the collar and let the fabric fall back across the designer’s arm.

“No,” Armand said.

Daniel’s brows rose. “No?”

“I should not have phrased it that way.”

The designer glanced between them.

Daniel looked at the shirt.

It was beautiful. Dark green, almost black until the light reached it. Soft enough that Daniel could already imagine the fabric sliding across his skin beneath the jacket.

He did like it.

That was not the same as Armand being entitled to know he would.

Armand leaned back in the armchair. “Would you like to try it?”

A question this time.

Daniel let the silence sit for a moment longer than necessary.

Minor revenge.

“Yeah,” he said. “I would.”

The designer stepped forward and helped him out of the current shirt.

Armand watched.

Of course he did.

Daniel caught his gaze in the mirror as the silk settled over his shoulders. The look contained appreciation, hunger, and the vindication of a man whose prediction had been confirmed.

He had enough sense not to say so aloud.

Progress.

The designer buttoned the shirt halfway and adjusted the collar. “We could close it higher for the premiere.”

“No,” Armand said.

Daniel looked at him.

Armand’s mouth closed.

The entire room waited.

He corrected himself.

“I would advise against it. The lower collar lengthens the line of his neck and will be more comfortable if the evening is warm.”

The designer turned to Daniel.

Not Armand.

“What do you prefer, Mr. Molloy?”

Daniel studied himself in the mirror.

The shirt looked good. Better than good. It made his eyes appear lighter and his skin less corpse-adjacent. The open collar prevented the whole thing from becoming too formal, too embalmed. With the charcoal jacket over it, he looked like himself after somebody had applied money and competent tailoring.

“At that height,” he said. “No tie.”

Armand exhaled quietly through his nose.

“You wanted the tie,” Daniel said.

“I believe it would complete the line.”

“It would make me look like I’m attending my own funeral.”

“You have technically already attended that.”

“Didn’t wear a tie then either.”

One of the assistants stared determinedly at the garment rack.

Armand rose and crossed the room.

He stopped behind Daniel, visible in the mirror but not yet touching him.

“May I?”

Daniel’s gaze met his reflection.

The question was unnecessary in the ordinary sense. Armand adjusted Daniel’s clothing constantly. Collars, cuffs, crooked seams, the hem of a shirt caught beneath a belt.

It was necessary in every other sense.

Daniel nodded.

Armand laid his hands on Daniel’s shoulders and smoothed the jacket into place. His fingers moved along the lapels, correcting the fall of the fabric. He tucked one side of the shirt collar beneath the jacket and left the other slightly open.

“Better,” he said.

“Your professional assessment?” Daniel asked.

“My personal one,” Armand said. He reached up and adjusted Daniel’s collar with deliberate care, letting his fingers linger against the side of Daniel’s throat before withdrawing.

“More credible,” Daniel replied, fighting the twitch at the corner of his mouth and losing.

The designers resumed moving around them.

The next hour became an elaborate negotiation conducted through cloth. Armand rejected fabrics that retained too much heat, colors he considered unflattering, and cuts that limited Daniel’s range of movement. Daniel rejected anything that made him look like Lestat, a casino owner, a televangelist, or an undertaker who charged extra for discretion.

Several garments occupied multiple categories.

Armand advised.

Daniel occasionally ignored him for the pleasure of watching his mouth tighten.

Once, a tailor looked toward Armand after asking Daniel whether he preferred one or two vents in the back of the jacket.

Armand did not answer.

“Mr. Molloy has not yet responded,” he said.

Small things.

Daniel appreciated them anyway.

They settled on the charcoal suit. Soft shoulders. A longer jacket that balanced Daniel’s height without swallowing him. Dark green silk beneath it, open at the throat. No tie. The pants sat slightly lower on the hip than Daniel normally wore, a detail Armand had suggested without mentioning whether another Daniel had once preferred it.

Present Daniel liked the line.

So present Daniel kept it.

A second suit was commissioned for the industry party, darker and less formal. Armand selected several possible fabrics and presented them to Daniel in order of preference while pretending the order meant nothing.

Daniel chose Armand’s second favorite.

He was not above asserting independence through petty aesthetic sabotage.

Armand retaliated by ordering shoes Daniel knew would be beautiful, comfortable, and offensively expensive.

Healthy compromise.

By the end of the fitting, the room looked as though fashion had exploded inside it. Pins glittered in the carpet. Empty coffee cups crowded on flimsy plastic tables. A half-finished glass of blood. Garment bags had multiplied through some process Daniel suspected required both wealth and dark magic.

The designers packed their materials and departed shortly before dawn.

Armand stood at the door thanking each of them by name.

Daniel watched from the hallway, jacket folded over one arm.

His mind wandered back toward their homes shared closet.

The old leather jacket remained inside, hanging beneath its dedicated light. The band shirt beside it.

Evidence.

Armand returned after locking the door.

“You selected well,” he said.

“I know.” Daniel stepped into Armand’s space, close enough that the answer became something more than arrogance.

Armand only hummed before looping his arms around Daniel’s neck, letting their length hang loosely over his shoulders.

“The tie would still improve the premiere look,” Armand said.

“Courtship revoked,” Daniel informed him.

“You cannot revoke courtship over a tie,” Armand replied, drawing him a fraction closer.

“Watch me,” Daniel said, with all the smug provocation of someone who had no intention of going anywhere.

Armand smiled, and Daniel smiled back.

How about that?

Three nights later, they left for France.

Armand had packed eleven pieces of luggage.

Daniel owned two of them.

Allegedly.

The garment bags containing their Cannes attire traveled separately in a climate-controlled vehicle to the private terminal. Another case held blood in temperature-regulated compartments. A smaller one contained medication Daniel technically no longer required but Armand insisted they carry anyway, along with burn treatments, emergency blackout material, spare phones, forged documents, and enough cash to destabilize a minor economy.

Daniel stood near the apartment door wearing jeans, a band t-shirt, and an old well preserved canvas jacket.

Armand looked at it.

“Suitable,” he said.

Daniel glanced down at himself. “For the private jet?”

“For you.”

That nearly became a moment.

Daniel prevented it.

“Touching. Now explain why we need eleven bags for four days.”

“We will be in France longer than four days,” Armand replied, fixing Daniel with an expression that suggested the correction should have settled the matter and possibly improved Daniel’s character.

“That was not an answer.” Daniel held his ground.

“You have three formal appearances, two fittings, a press luncheon you will not attend, a private screening, the premiere, the Q&A, and an industry party,” Armand asserted, looking at him as though Daniel were being deliberately childish.

Maybe he was. It was fun to antagonize Armand.

“Still hearing maybe four bags.”

“Five contain your belongings.”

“That is a defamatory claim.”

“I packed them in your presence.”

“Circumstantial evidence.”

Armand rolled his eyes, opened the door, and led the way down the stairs toward the building’s entrance.

A car waited outside beneath the paling sky, black windows reflecting the row of sleeping townhomes and historic apartment buildings. Their driver stood beside it while another man loaded the final cases.

Daniel paused on the threshold.

Behind him was the small domestic life they had built almost by accident. The shared couch. The studio. The dressing room. The bed where Armand had tried to return him to an old relationship and then, when Daniel refused, asked permission to begin another.

Ahead waited Cannes.

France carried more ghosts than Daniel could count and more than Armand had named.

Armand held out his hand.

Daniel took it.

They stepped outside together.

Whatever waited for them in France, neither of them were going back to past.

They were going somewhere new not returning to old habits.

At least, that was the theory.

The amount of luggage they packed however suggested an invasion.

/tv/ — Television & Film

Anonymous 04/06/26(Mon) 01:42:18 No.203847119

REUPLOAD — DANIEL MOLLOY THEATER VIDEO
Reuploading before this disappears too.

This was posted to TikTok last night by an account called @nycfilmwatch, then deleted less than twenty minutes later. The entire account is gone now.

The video appears to show journalist Daniel Molloy holding hands with an unidentified young Bengali man inside the lobby of a high-end movie theater. They are standing at the concierge counter and seem to be checking in for a private screening or reservation.

The person recording whispers something to someone off-camera, but the words are impossible to make out over the lobby music.

At approximately eight seconds, the younger man turns and looks directly into the camera lens.

Then he raises his eyes slightly, as though looking past the phone and directly at whoever is filming.

The camera begins shaking. A loud coughing fit can be heard before the recording abruptly cuts off.

No idea whether this is viral marketing for The Vampire Lestat, but the original poster has not returned.

Anonymous 04/06/26(Mon) 01:45:03 No.203847186

that’s obviously his boyfriend from the deuxmoi post lol
leave old people alone

Anonymous 04/06/26(Mon) 01:47:51 No.203847244

Why did he look at the camera before the person filming made any sound?

Anonymous 04/06/26(Mon) 01:49:12 No.203847291

203847244
he obviously has spooky mind powers. get with the program lol